II

The Valley of Death

2

Why? Towards a Theory

of the Holocaust

'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.'¹ Poetry, a language of hope, wrestles with the present to give it form and beauty.² Carrying out its task must so mock those who died that 'it has become impossible to write poetry today.' Poetry, hope, no longer possible? Poets are certainly writing today, among and around us, even about Auschwitz – every time they take up the pen refuting Adorno's assertion as if it were mere hyperbole, a rhetorical flourish. Just as certainly tens of thousands of survivors have long since created new lives – finding shelter, settling anew, recreating normal worlds, raising families – showing indeed that hope is inextinguishable even after Auschwitz.³

    Yet the assertion is correct. The survivors know, the poets know, we all know that along with the six million Jews – and with them the tens of thousands of gypsies and millions of Poles and Russians who were gassed, shot and starved to death – something fundamental to all who come after them, perhaps the very premisses of poetry and hope, did die in the extermination camps,

    The experience of this catastrophe will not vanish: it eventually finds its way into the material and mental structures of the entire world. Whether we comprehend it or not, it undermines our hope, mutes our struggles and expectations – and diminishes our ability to deal with many of the urgent issues facing us.

    Adorno certainly knew that poetry would continue no matter what, just as Auschwitz would recede into the past. But whenever it is evoked in the present, the Holocaust crushes hope if it is felt at anything remotely approaching the force with which it lies in wait in the recesses of our consciousness. Until such an encounter, and afterwards, it is possible to hope. But to see the extermination

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camps, even for a moment, withers and paralyzes our usual premisses, categories, forms, words and voice. It happened, but it is beyond belief. Nothing in our language, nothing in our range of feeling, is prepared to grasp or render the nature of this event. Whatever we say, or even feel, falls short. In fundamental ways it will probably remain forever unspeakable, and hence incomprehensible. Its scale and nature are such to ensure that, as Friedrich Meinecke once said of the entire Nazi period, that understanding its deeper causes 'will still occupy the coming centuries – provided these centuries are indeed still able and inclined to ponder problems of this kind.'⁴ When one has, perhaps only temporarily, lifted oneself beyond the overwhelming hopelessness and rage the Holocaust produces when closely studied, it is only to confront dismaying intellectual obstacles. The courts which tried Adolf Eichmann, acknowledging that the mind can hardly encompass the intentional and systematic murder of six million people, suggested that its understanding was a matter 'for great authors and poets.'⁵

    One reason is that the Holocaust permits no stable point of view: language and concepts strain to capture its enormity, yet when conjured up its presence paralyzes language and concepts. Cold, detached description of numbers killed, of body piled upon body fosters stunned outrage, which then in turn gives rise to repression. The importance of daily life vanishes before it, but, sooner or later, it then dissolves back into the normality of daily life. We cannot help but feel impotent and mute before it, and we cannot help also feeling that perhaps we are wrong to ponder it, and try to write about it. Wrong, that is, to try to organize and conceptualize something the essence of which is to remain hideously far beyond our normal range of thoughts and feelings. Indeed, does it not trivialize the Holocaust, and thus defile the memory of the dead, to try to grasp it?

    Yet as poets continue to write, so we continue to strain to understand it, spurred on by the continuing presence of the catastrophe a generation later, knowing that to raise it beyond the human, to call it 'demonic' and give up trying to comprehend it is perhaps the final outrage. After all, human beings planned and carried out the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Problem', and did so under specific conditions and for specific reasons. Even if stunned by the result, we know all the same that the facts are human, and thus demand to be understood and their recurrence prevented.⁶

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 23

The Nazis set out to eliminate a people who were not even remotely combatants in a war – to eliminate them precisely and only because they existed. This is too horrifying for a 'proper' response... we read it and think it and if we can imagine it our heart grows numb, our mind weak. ... The deliberate murder of an entire people including (of course) its children! But the country-by-country statistics impose their own strange calm as we read about the Final Solution: in Poland, of an estimated Jewish population of 3,300,000, 3,000,000 were killed; in the Soviet Union over a million and a quarter; in the Baltic countries 228,000 died of 253,000; in Austria and Germany 210,000 of the 240,000 who had remained; in the Netherlands 105,000 of 140,000 died; in Hungary, 450,000 of 650,000. ... The total, just short of six million, was over two-thirds of the Jews that had lived in these areas prior to the war, and was perhaps ninety per cent of those within the Nazis' reach.

    Remembering the horrifying specifics shatters the numbing calm: the Yellow Star; the forced ghettoization of Poland's Jews; the German efforts to starve Ghetto populations everywhere on a diet of bread and potatoes; the Nazi claims of 'a paradisiac existence' awaiting those Jews who would freely 'relocate'; the accounts of long trains of freight cars packed with people headed for extermination; people denying to the last this unbelievable thing that was happening to them; people struggling to the last to retain even the most pitiful fragments of human dignity; specific catastrophes such as the mass execution of 33,000 people in a single day at the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev in 1941; the final 'shower' at the gas chambers; the piles of gold teeth extracted from the mouths of the dead, the fingernail marks made on the ceilings of the gas chambers by those who were clawing, animal-like, for the last drop of air. ...

    Having been kept in the dark about it until then, the world learned about the Holocaust immediately after the war. A wave of shock and sympathy for the victims was followed by a generational coma. But for a few insistent voices most of the Western world seemed to be in a kind of shock about the Holocaust for a generation. Was the Holocaust too difficult to talk and think about until enough time had passed to give birth not only to new children but also to their children in turn? Does so great a catastrophe numb automatically, ebbing only with time? Today, however, the mood of silence is dissipated and a whole culture is beginning to absorb the Holocaust into its con-

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sciousness. Even in the years of shock and silence, a heroic few would not stop telling the story, creating memoirs and fiction, studying the history, writing for those who would listen and for those who felt lost. Recently they have increased so many times over that in our world the Holocaust has become an everyday term. Every best-seller list and every new book shelf seems to contain works on the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem', its perpetrators, its survivors, even their children. Several hundred college courses are now given on the topic, and countless others include the Holocaust as part of required discourse and reading. Not long ago it received two sure tokens of public legitimacy in America, a Presidential Commission and a week-long television special. The long period of numb and silent shock has ended.

    Some people have been asking why for a generation, at first the why that beseeches the heavens in protest, the dumbfounded why that refuses to accept, the why one of whose meanings is no. With the passage of time and the development of distance, that why has begun to be refashioned into the why spurring reflection and scholarship. Considering how few years have passed, a remarkable amount of indispensable work has been done towards describing the Holocaust and the world that produced it.

    To speak of explaining the Holocaust, however, is to refer to a level of generality which would grasp its essential features in such a way as to connect it with major lines of human history before and into the twentieth century. I speak, in other words, of a theory of the Holocaust.⁷

    What are our starting points for a theory of the Holocaust? First, that the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem' and the entire camp and murder system was not 'demonic' but a human action. We must begin there, and call for understanding in human terms. On the most simple level this means establishing what manner of act was the Final Solution, who was responsible for it, and why was it done. Even describing the Final Solution turns out to be no simple task. What, after all, is it that we are seeking to explain? That so many were killed? Or that they were killed so systematically? Or that they were noncombatants and occupied no defined territory? Or that, like their killers, they were European? What is it, if anything, that makes the extermination of European Jewry a unique historical event?

    Secondly, the question of who is responsible has already received

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 25

a number of unsatisfactory answers, from Taylor's condemnation of the German people as the source of Nazism to Golo Mann's opposite emphasis on one evil man, Adolf Hitler.⁸ Understanding the Holocaust involves clarifying the relationship of the process of genocide to those who ordered it, those who carried it out or supported it, and those who 'merely' accepted it without protest. The question, after all, points us to ask not only about the 'chain of command' but also about the nature and structures of a society which made the unthinkable into the possible.

    And finally, we must ask why did it happen? This is perhaps the most taxing and speculative of the questions, not only because explaining any large historical event is so difficult, but also because of the obvious irrationality of Nazi policy. If the Jews were not really the force of evil that the Nazis claimed them to be, then why did they act to exterminate them? What madness, both social and psychological, infected the society that created the Holocaust? As should be obvious, these questions entail significant issues and demand chains of reflection and speculation. They demand combining the psychological and the social dimensions into a single coherent account in order both to insist on the fundamental irrationality of the Final Solution and to explain its deeper logic.

Describing the Holocaust: Its Historical

Uniqueness

Is there anything unique about the Holocaust when placed against the century's other mass murders? The Holocaust stands out against the twisted landscape of death in the twentieth century as the one mass murder utterly devoid of instrumental purpose: there is no comprehensible reason for it. Certainly obsessive antagonism towards the Jews was a functional bedrock of Nazism, first uniting the movement, then later providing enormous material benefits to tens of thousands during the dispossessions? But all this was secondary, if not unintended: the Nazi passion against the Jews was just that, a passion. Jews were exterminated not because they stood in the way of Nazi goals – for example either by occupying contested space or offering resistance. Rather, their extermination was the goal. All other mass killings of this century have at least a clear, if

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tenuous, connection with significant political purposes. And in most cases the murders have ended with the conflict which produced them. The Germans, on the contrary, rounded up Jews and shipped them off to be gassed after they became masters of a certain area, not in order to master it. Extermination of the Jews was an end in itself.

    The Final Solution indeed weakened the Germans' ability to fight.¹⁰ Nearly the entire Hungarian Jewish community was shipped to Auschwitz in May and June 1944, and gassed there while the Soviets were pushing the Germans out of Eastern Europe and the British and Americans were invading Normandy! Were not the troops and supplies more needed in the battles to keep the Soviets out of eastern Hungary? Were not the 147 trains of thirty cars each more needed for rushing troops to the multiplying fronts?¹¹ 'More needed' – no such calculus animated German policy because extermination of the Jews was itself so necessary that the approach of the Red Army, and certain defeat, only intensified the work of the ovens. It was as if, after all, this was Hitler's purpose, the Nazis' holy mission, their contribution to Western civilization. That work stopped only when, by October 1944, it had become substantially completed: Central Europe had been rendered judenrein, free of Jews. Only a handful of survivors still lived in territories which were once home to nine million Jews. One must insist on the diabolical uniqueness of the Final Solution, even in this century of death.

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Describing the

Holocaust

Unfortunately, as time passes, the Holocaust even if diabolically unique, becomes a historical fact like anything else. It achieves a solidity, a thereness which incorporates it all too easily into the rationality of human history. In seeking its causes and meanings we cannot help but endow it with an aura of inevitability which indeed suggests a kind of historical legitimacy. Actions, trends lead to it; actions, trends lead from it. The Holocaust becomes part of the order of things. Furthermore, when historians try to bracket out their outrage and shock that such a thing has happened, when they approach it dispassionately in the name of scholarly objectivity, the last step may be taken towards making it a rational project of human energy and

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 27

intentions, merely one possible project among others. The Greek term Holocaust, evoking as it does the uncontrolled horror of mass burning by fire, as well as the Jewish determination to remember it forever, are only feeble antidotes to this distorting process of objectification.¹²

    Study might profitably begin with a subjective response, one which points towards the structures of the Holocaust by suggesting what it means to us. By saying to us I have in mind a yet more specific subjectivity, that of the Nazis' actual or intended victims. When words can be found, what indeed does the Holocaust mean to Jews? Among the most frequent terms used to describe the Final Solution are evil and mad. They are used freely, without self-consciousness about their technical appropriateness or objectivity, and they simultaneously express, judge and describe. To call the Final Solution evil is to judge it morally; to call it mad is to judge it morally and psychologically. Moral judgements, where they are serious, are descriptions of the actions they judge and illuminate their structure. Thus they are key terms for a moral phenomenology of the Final Solution.

    To speak of evil may make the reader pause. Claims of good waging war on evil have accompanied every one of the catastrophic events or threats to be treated in this study. Most of the hundred million victims of our century are sacrifices to one or another form of moral Manicheism. Indeed, the Nazis saw their victims as the absolute embodiment of evil, and their mission as cleansing the earth of them.¹³

    Gil Elliot is not only mistaken but implicitly self-contradictory, when he argues in the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead that moral judgements convey and illuminate nothing about the great mass murders. After all, his own book has a deeply moral purpose: to sketch the great evil of our age. And implicit in such a project is the goal of better understanding it to avoid repeating it. We cannot dispense with such terms of judgement, because morality is both fundamental to political understanding and a necessary dimension of the structure of every action.

    If we are to rescue the word from misuse by religious or political holy warriors we should restrict the application of evil to actions, not people. As Peter Phillips argues most convincingly and movingly, we simply perpetuate the moral blindness of the Nazis by considering them a race apart. They differ from us only by degrees.¹⁴

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    In evoking this perspective, however, I have replaced the subjective starting point with a call for a certain kind of engaged objectivity. Are the two compatible? I have suggested that we all, non-Jew as well as Jew, begin our encounter with the Holocaust as Jews. That is, we can minimize the false objectification as far as possible and begin to glimpse and appreciate what actually happened, if we situate ourselves in the victim's place. Then it is crystal-clear what is meant by extermination. The shock, the rage, the initial unbelievability give rise to calling the Nazis evil and mad. They were barbarians. But at some point the process of understanding can continue forward only if we shift our perspective to look behind the act to try to understand those who did it and why. At this point it may impede understanding to view the Holocaust as Jews: rage towards those who carried out the extermination programme may indeed be millennial, and may make all studies of it into thinly veiled acts of revenge. What is needed then is a perspective which can ask why such evil and madness made sense. Is such understanding possible without sympathy? If we may best begin to grasp the Holocaust as Jews, perhaps we may best complete our understanding of it as the Nazis' fellow human beings. Then, perhaps we can glimpse why these particular people became demonic. In fact, as I will argue, the Germans who participated in the Final Solution acted in response to the pressures they experienced and the prospects they saw before them: which means that anyone, ourselves included, could under certain circumstances become mass murderers. A perspective appropriate to this fact precludes all righteousness.

Evil and Madness

What makes the Final Solution evil has already been indicated: its purpose was to destroy the Jews of Europe. That was its only purpose. Certainly we may speak of all contemporary societies as being in some sense evil, just as we may comment on all war as evil. Indeed, in systemically inhumane societies such as ours, we may all have to concede our own participation in exploitation, oppression, the stunting of human capacities and wasting of lives. But the age-old systematic practice of harming and even killing of human beings has always been kept within certain limits. One limit has been its

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 29

economic purpose as with slavery. A certain rudimentary regard for human beings was always built into slavery. Slaves were, after all, valuable chattels. Another kind of limitation, in the case of war, has been set by its military purpose.¹⁵ Above all, humans have been exploited and killed for a reason, and those reasons have defined – and restricted – the various evils visited upon humans by humans as means to specific ends. However, rarely if ever in history can we glimpse the spectacle of extermination as a policy, and certainly never on the scale wrought by the Nazis. The building and operation of killing centres whose sole purpose was to exterminate the Jews and other lesser peoples are the most eloquent arguments that the Final Solution deserves to be regarded as unmitigatedly evil in its structure.

    It might be argued that because the Nazis believed that they were ridding the world of what they regarded as its source of evil, they, too, killed for a reason. But the very fact that the Nazis believed that the Final Solution would 'cleanse' Europe of the 'vermin' who were the source of its ills marks their undertaking not with moral purpose but with madness. Mad: this term of outrage and judgement is also a term of description, and it may have an unsettling effect on the reader. Irrational perhaps, but mad? I use this as a term of moral phenomenology with intentions similar to those in speaking of the Final Solution as evil. The issue is not whether the individual Nazis were themselves mad: like Arendt's Eichmann, they all may have been quite normal in their environment. Our concern is rather with their outlook and actions.

    To be sure, if Freud is right we are all somewhat mad, in the sense that being civilized is a sure token of a rupture with significant dimensions of our own and external reality. To employ madness, as a term of social diagnosis, however, is to suggest a collective inability or refusal to experience that reality, and the substitution for it of something mentally conjured up. Individuals regarded as clinically mad dwell systematically among such wholly subjective conjurings, to the point of ordering their lives around them. They differ from the rest of us, of course, only by degree. Similarly, if there is no completely sane society, at various moments of history it is none the less possible to point to societies which in decisive ways have ruptured with reality and acted out wholly subjective fantasies. To describe the Final Solution as mad is to characterize it as a policy which expresses

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such a systematic rupture with reality.¹⁶

    The question is unavoidable: was Hitler mad? At the end, of course, he had lost contact with reality, refusing to even hear reports from the fronts. His last words, which blame the war on the Jews, were clearly the rantings of a madman, as was his less widely known decision to destroy Germany.¹⁷ But just as clearly his tactical course between, for example, 1930 and 1933 shows him to be a political genius. His brilliance and extraordinary talents included a fine grasp of the objective situation and how to steer through it, exploit it, and ultimately dominate it.¹⁸ But even if on this tactical level he was consummately rational, on a deeper level Hitler had already broken with reality.

    Mein Kampf is a crazy quilt of sense and nonsense, of brilliant perception and mad railing. But it remains an integral whole, a Weltanschauung. At its root, as the source of all evil to the German Volk, one finds the Jews as international conspirators, controllers of the world's press, carriers of disease, leaders of Bolshevism, financial swindlers, pornographers and procurers. In his study of Hitler's Weltanschauung Eberhard Jäckel presents a remarkable catalogue of references to the Jews from the first volume of Mein Kampf: 'The Jew is a maggot in a rotting corpse; he is a plague worse than the Black Death of former times; a germ carrier of the worst sort; mankind's eternal germ of disunion; the drone that insinuates its way into the rest of mankind; the spider that slowly sucks the people's blood out of its pores; the pack of rats fighting bloodily among themselves; the parasite in the body of other peoples; the typical parasite; the people's vampire ....'¹⁹

    Madness, like evil, is self-evident to those not sharing in it. What is most remarkable about this particular example is that it became enough of a mass outlook for a movement, and then society as a whole to be organized around it.²⁰ As Peter Merkl says, speaking of those believing in antisemitic²¹ conspiracy theories: 'The movement was literally led by the paranoids.'²² Hitler and Nazi Germany meant it and acted on it: step by step the Jews were isolated as the non-human carriers of disease, removed from the community, set apart and isolated, and then, appropriately, exterminated.

    Most political ideology disfigures reality. In the next chapter we shall see how Marxism, though containing a critique of ideology, succumbed to the same distorting process as liberal and conservative

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 31

ideologies, and for the same reasons: to fit a refractory reality to an outlook which needed to see it differently. The Nazi vision, however, and the process of implementing it, leaped far beyond even these political distortions.

    Nazi antisemitism is a rupture with reality. I choose this formulation rather than the overly functionalistic emphasis on the Jews as scapegoats in order to insist on the element of madness in Nazi policy.²³ There is indeed a logic to the Final Solution, and I will argue that its roots lie in the history and structure of German society. But it is the logic of a movement which has decisively rejected logic, which has, that is, broken in key respects with the instrumental rationality we usually assume to govern political thought and action.²⁴

    The Nazi Party Programme, drafted in 1920 and 'declared to be unalterable', rejects citizenship for Jews but unlike Mein Kampf does not yet make them the source of all evil. However, the party manifesto on agriculture, proclaimed ten years later when Nazism had become a mass movement, reflects the full-scale paranoia we have seen in Hitler's words. It largely blames the state of German farming on 'the Jewish world money-market, which actually controls parliamentary democracy in Germany [and] wishes to destroy German agriculture'; on Jewish domination of wholesale trade; and on Jewish control of electric power, fertilizer and credit.²⁵

    One of the essential features of such madness is the abandonment of the distinction between fantasy and reality. To Nazism destroying the Jews meant literally destroying the source of the world's evil. Symptomatic of its delusionary universe was the prominence given to an organic, magical and biological language, an antiscientific language of incantation. For Alfred Rosenberg, in a book which sold over a million copies by 1942, the Jew's parasitism should be described 'exactly in the same way in which we speak of parasitic occurrences in the life of plants and animals. The sacculina pierces the rectum of the common crab, and gradually grows into it, sucks away its vital forces; the same process occurs when the Jew invades society through the open wounds of the people, consuming their creative forces and hastening the doom of a society.'²⁶

    Such language served Nazi needs well. It raised their assertions beyond dispassionate, objective study while imparting to them a pseudoscientific cast. Detached from the need for verification, such language evoked the mystified fears of those unable to face reality

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directly. Thus detached, it gave license to complete subjectivity, allowing them to combine the most incongruent ideas into a single whole. Thus, in this 1937 statement of Goebbels, the subhuman Jew becomes the superhuman threat: 'Behold, this is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of civilizations, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the materialized demon of mankind's decay.'²⁷

    Above all, such language had a transforming function. Alex Bein argues that Nazi teachings were so widespread and widely believed that the Jew ceased to appear as a human being to most people. He came to appear 'as some lower animal, like worms and insects, terrible and incomprehensible in their destructive effect and, above all, like the parasitic microbiological creatures invisible to the naked eye, the bacilli and bacteria which one daily heard and read about as carriers of disease and decay.'²⁸ Hence, the rupture: social problems were successfully pointed away from social causes, evocatively focused on a 'carrier of disease' who, moreover, lacked social power and was susceptible to attack. The Jew was weak but strong, subhuman but superhuman; the image of 'parasite' unifies these contradictory conceptions.

    The conception of the Jews that made genocide possible is summed up by an instruction manual for the Nazi leadership. 'The subhuman man, who to all appearances is a biologically homogeneous, natural creation with hands, feet, and some sort of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is all the same a totally different, a terrifying creature; he is endowed with human features – though merely a sketch version of the true human being – mentally, spiritually he stands lower than an animal. Inside this man there rages a violent chaos of wild uninhibited emotions: unspeakable destructiveness, primitive lust, unashamed vileness. Subhuman man – nothing else.... He hates the work of the other [that is, of the true man]. He rails against it, furtively as a thief, openly as a slanderer – as a murderer ... Never has the subhuman man kept the peace, permanent troublemaker that he is. ... He needs for his self-preservation the mire, the hell, but not the sun. – And this underworld of the subhuman man found its leader! The Eternal Jew!'²⁹

    Even forty years later this language has not lost its power to shock – and yet, how much more shocking that these mad ravings should have become the language of policy! Already in Mein Kampf

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 33

Hitler had indicated what should have been done to Germany's Jews at the start of and during the First World War: 'twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people' should have been gassed.³⁰ In power, this madness moved to its conclusion: the parasites were exterminated.

    The Nazi outlook began as a systematic distortion of reality. In power, however, the Nazis were able to reshape reality until it conformed to the distorted fantasy.³¹ In this wild sense, the Nazi outlook became true. The blood fellowship of the German Volk was brought into being in step after deadly step as the Jews were systematically reduced to the status of subhumans: removed from the civil service, disenfranchised, deprived of German citizenship, prohibited from ritual slaughter, their property expropriated, made to wear a special badge. Nazi policy made the Jews over into the vermin Nazism claimed they were from the beginning. Finally, having changed their legal, social, political and economic status into that of living subhumans and having threatened them with extermination should Germany go to war, the final step was carried out: Jews were exterminated. Elimination of humans as vermin was the final break with reality. Madness became policy in the Einsatzgruppen and the gas chambers.³² If this meant that psychopathic insanity became normal character structure in the leaders of the Third Reich,³³ it also meant a systematic corruption of thought and speech patterns.³⁴ Language militates against the extermination of a people. If it could not be said without implying that it was horrifyingly evil, then references to it had to be detached from all conventional associations in order to disguise what was being said. Thought and language themselves underwent a systematic rupture with reality during the Third Reich.

Responsibility for the Final Solution

The issue of responsibility for the Holocaust appeared at Nürnberg in 1945 and has not left us yet. Was Hitler primarily to blame, or was it the Nazis, or the German people as a whole.'? Was extermination of six million Jews a direct result of the movement that brought Hitler to power or in some sense the product of German society, or Hitler's own project carried out by hundreds of thousands unable or unwilling to resist his authority? If our first question was what was the Final

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Solution, we must now ask who was responsible for it.

    It is ironic, but perhaps appropriate, that the most sweeping and powerful argument ever made on behalf of human responsibility, Sartre's Being and Nothingness, was being published in Paris as French Jews were being shipped away by a system of evil perfected to minimize anyone's sense of responsibility for it. Only a handful did the actual killing. In a characteristic combination of gangsterism and bureaucracy, the rest either gave the orders without speaking the words or were mere distant accomplices operating this or that corner of the vast machinery under orders. How far can responsibility for such an operation be extended?

    It may help us to think in terms of circles of responsibility, moving from the actual perpetrators themselves – both political and technical – to the network of those whose activities supported the extermination, then to those who knew about it and passively acquiesced in and accepted it, and finally to those who perhaps knew nothing about it or even opposed it inwardly but helped to create the conditions in which it became possible.

    Certainly in the first circle of responsibility stands Hitler himself, who conceived³⁵ of the mass murder of the Jews and ordered the Final Solution. And here we must include those closest to him, such as Himmler, who directed its carrying out, and the inner circle of leading Nazis. In the next circle of responsibility are the several hundred who, claiming to act only under Hitler's orders, planned and directed every phase of the Final Solution and who have largely been brought to trial since.³⁶

    There is no debate about the direct responsibility of the inner circle of perpetrators themselves. And there is compelling reason to include in the outermost circles of passive responsibility those outside Germany who knew of the great secret and kept it secret, doing nothing to stop the Holocaust. I refer especially to the leaders of the countries which remained indifferent to the Jews' fate, such as the United States and Great Britain – not only by restricting immigration but later by refusing to attack the camps or the rail lines leading to them.³⁷ But the greatest area of controversy concerns all those in between: the obedient operators of the extermination machinery and those who peopled the various layers of the interconnected administrative, mechanical and policing apparatus; the loyal Nazis unconnected to the Final Solution, and non-party members who had

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 35

helped, or supported, or merely accepted Hitler's rise to power; and loyal Germans elsewhere who knew of the exterminations and did nothing to stop them.

Whose Authority?

In the third circle are the executioners themselves, hardly more than fifty thousand ss members at the camps and in mobile killing teams. Members of this group have occasionally been brought to trial and convicted, often in connection with 'excesses'. What is their responsibility? The problem of establishing responsibility in a hierarchical structure such as Nazi Germany (or indeed America during the Vietnam War) led Stanley Milgram to devise his experiments on obedience to authority. Milgram's starting point is his notion that, while the policies of the Final Solution originated in the mind of Hitler, they were carried out on a massive scale only because a very large number of people abandoned their consciences and obeyed orders to do harm to the innocent.³⁸

    Milgram's question was: Why did they obey? To answer this he devised the celebrated experiments which tricked people hired as assistants into becoming subjects;³⁹ these showed an alarmingly high willingness of subjects to obey orders, no matter what. But his 'proof' that a large percentage of individuals will obey an evil authority hinges on distorted notions of both individual and authority.

    Milgram's guiding image of the individual is that of an autonomous person who 'merges ... into an organizational structure' and so abandons his own ability to weigh his actions and their consequences morally.⁴⁰ Milgram's guiding image of authority is of someone rigorously external to the individual, who seeks to have the individual do his purposes, and easily manipulates and lies to the individual.⁴¹ With these guiding images Milgram constructs for us a model of the moral individual murdering under a chain of command which extends back, in the case of the Final Solution, to Hitler.⁴²

    However significant his purposes, Milgram asks the wrong question and gives the wrong answer. After all, Milgram's 'subjects', as late twentieth century Americans, believe in the authority of science and share with their manipulator a whole set of implicit and explicit values about the employer-employee contract. Should we not ex-

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pect individual disobedience to legitimate authority in a smoothly functioning society to develop only slowly and with great difficulty? What, after all, is more striking, that in the master experiment 60 per cent of the 'subjects' obeyed, or that 40 per cent of them refused to obey?

    Milgram's distorted sense of individual autonomy is but the obverse of his distorted sense of authority: he himself acts as a devious manipulator whose goal is to impose radically foreign purposes on his subjects. But was this how Hitler functioned? Contrary to Milgram's assumptions, it is necessary to insist that for the German ss guard, Hitler was his chosen authority. Milgram seems not to realize that this was the man who had received 13 million votes for president in 1932; that he was seen as the Führer; that his party was hegemonic in German society because of the very ideas found in Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda; that the victory of Nazism was in its essence already a surrender of whatever 'autonomy' had been possible in Weimar society; that joining the ss meant the complete acceptance of Nazi ideas and a determination to carry them out. The ss oath of induction promised: 'I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty and valour. I pledge to you and to the superiors whom you will appoint obedience unto death, so help me God.'⁴³

    Those who spoke these words murdered six million Jews. They were overwhelmingly not 'ordinary Germans' but members of the Nazi movement. From that movement came the 3,000 executioners of the Einsatzgruppen, who shot a million Soviet Jews, this 'determined army of death', in Heinz Höhne's words: 'Wholly dedicated to achievement, hardness and camaraderie, they reached a degree of insensibility surpassed only by those soulless automata, the concentration-camp guards. Here was to be found the elite of that barbaric type of mankind, intoxicated by its own achievements, which Himmler exalted as the ss ideal; it was indeed an Order of the Death's Head, divorced from the world of ordinary mortals and from their moral standards, ready to undertake any mission ordered by its masters, and prisoner of a community claiming the sole right to decide the ss man's social and ethical standards. For years their leaders had drummed into the men now forming the Einsatzgruppen that they should yield themselves to the intoxication of power, that they should savour the elite's feeling of superiority and consider

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 37

themselves a class above the mass of Party members, too superior to conform to their moral standards – they even claimed for themselves the right to turn men into subjects for biological laboratory experiments.'⁴⁴

    If anyone thoroughly believed the propaganda of Nazism – and if anyone was selected and trained to embody Nazi ideals – it was members of the ss. From them were chosen first the mobile killing teams, and later the staff of the extermination camps. If it had been central to Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda, the outlook that led to Auschwitz became a standard part of the ss training lectures: 'The Jew is a parasite. Wherever he flourishes, the people die. From the earliest times to our own day the Jew has quite literally killed and exterminated the peoples upon whom he has battened, insofar as he has been able to do so. Elimination of the Jew from our community is to be regarded as an emergency defence measure.'⁴⁵ In short, those who actually killed Jews were carrying out a policy for which they were quite prepared and to which they had become personally committed.

Beyond the Camps: Whose Responsibility?

But how deeply into German society, how far beyond those who directed it and those whose hands were bloodied, does responsibility extend for the Final Solution? Certainly some degree of responsibility is borne by all those hundreds of thousands who were part of the complex and far-reaching death machinery – including the soldiers and ss troops who rounded up Jews and shipped them to the camps, countless clerks, construction workers and railroad crews. Beyond these are all those hundreds of thousands of Germans who, years before, dutifully performed the various tasks which led up to the Final Solution, and who have argued since that the open and vigorous antisemitism of the 1930s – disenfranchising and expropriating Jews – was one thing and Hitler's policy of extermination quite another. What kind of responsibility extends to the hundreds of thousands who joined the nsdap before it achieved power, or to the nineteen million who voted for it in the 1933 election? Or to those who, sensing the evil and madness of this man and his movement, did not devote themselves to blocking the Nazi path to power

38

by whatever means necessary? To those who were politically paralyzed by the rapid Nazi rise to prominence? Does it extend indeed to German society as a whole?

    Or is the truth rather the opposite – namely that Hitler and his barbarian clique elbowed their way into power at a time of crisis and then, bit by bit, imposed their insane will upon the party, German society, and Europe, to the point of genocide and suicide? While no historian denies the relevance of the flourishing German tradition of antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, neither is it possible to deny that the Final Solution, as Dawidowicz put it, 'had its origins in Hitler's mind'.⁴⁶ Indeed, even Himmler claimed to have been astonished when he first heard Hitler's plans for the Final Solution. If the nsdap and ss leaders directed it with monstrous efficiency, not one of them believed in it sufficiently to stand up for it and defend it at Nürnberg.

    The fact that extermination was hardly ever discussed directly, and that official policy was to keep it secret, makes it even more difficult to ascribe it to German society as a whole. Whatever their sense of divine mission, those who ordered and directed it were equally aware that it was a crime to be hidden even from the rank-and-file of the Nazi movement. Nor must we forget that by the beginning of the war most Jews had already fled Germany, leaving only perhaps 250,000 to be deported from Germany itself; that the killing centres were located in the newly acquired areas of Poland, not in Germany,⁴⁷ and that the murders were committed in wartime, indeed after the invasion of the ussr opened its bloodiest phase. Moreover the ss was assisted in the extermination programme by native fascists and antisemites everywhere: Letts, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles and Rumanians.

    Within Germany, it has been emphasized, while many of the votes that brought Hitler to the anteroom of power may have been antisemitic, many others were votes to destroy Weimar democracy and entrust the state to a man who would rule. Others cast in their lot with the only party that seemed sufficiently vigorous to be able to end the depression. And still others because, like Albert Speer's mother, they liked 'to see clean-cut young men march through the streets, a sight that promised order in the midst of chaos and exemplified energy in the midst of despair.'⁴⁸

    If bitter antisemitism characterizes many of the Nazi supporters

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 39

studied by Theodore Abel and Milton Mayer, there was no expectation in the earlier study of the approaching doomsday and no rejoicing in the later one over its achievement. Nearly all of these people leave us with a sense that genocide was Hitler's policy, or at most that of the million or so wildgewordene Spiessbürger⁴⁹ who made up the most committed Nazis. Few among even the most crazed Nazis could have known that the modern nation-state was about to give them the means for translating 'Juda, verrecke' into reality for the first time in history. Had they known, would they have been so casual in their calls for violence?

Who Was Hitler?

But to point at Hitler and a relatively small group poses another question: who, after all, was this man Hitler, and how did he attain the power to exterminate European Jewry? Mein Kampf is emphatically a German, petty-bourgeois document that could have been produced only during Weimar, after defeat, revolution, counterrevolution and disastrous inflation. In Hitler a number of historical currents came together: racism, bourgeois values of law and order, petty-bourgeois resentment, a sentimentalized vision of home and family, nature mysticism, nationalism, and expansionism – plus a 20th century populist determination to realize these ideas politically by activating the German people,⁵⁰ No single element was unique to Hitler; rather (in Sartre's formulation), he intertorized a number of decisive historical trends in his developing years, and then reexteriorized them as his project. However, the essence of the latter was to become Germany's project. If the elements which went into the making of Adolf Hitler belong to his class, his nation's experience and his historical moment, it would be contradictory to claim that the resultant project somehow belonged exclusively to Adolf Hitler the individual. To say (as for example Henry Pachter does) that 'Hitler had become Germany's destiny',⁵¹ suggests not only that he held power, but that his power and projects all became possible because he had absorbed and lived decisive historical currents.⁵² This was the sole basis for his power after 1933: to shape the new incarnation of such trends.

    The point, then, is not that fifty thousand Nazis obeyed their

40

Führer but that, after all, these Nazis became a dominant political force able to take hold of the machinery of the state and make genocide official state policy. Why was Hitler able to become the absolute leader, whose word was law and whose name became the German greeting? Why indeed was he able to attain power quite legally, after receiving one third of the vote? The questions underscore the central point: Hitler and the Nazis were as much created by German society as they were its rulers.

    It is beside the point to assert, by way of extenuation, that they took power in a crisis. The spectacular rise of the challenging party, and the absence of sufficiently vital alternatives, were key dimensions of the crisis itself. The ascendant movement created the vacuum by paralyzing its enemies politically on the eve of seizing power. The Nazis did this by proclaiming absolute obedience, racism, a cult of violence, aggressive national expansion, and antisemitism: these were not hidden aims imposed after Hitler took power, but lay at the very heart of his enormous popular support. However they were understood, outside of the working class a majority of Germans supported the movement that promised them these things.

Antisemitism in Power

Merkl's statistical study of the essays gathered by Theodore Abel in 1934 reveals 'the presence of extraordinary amounts of prejudice and hatred in the respondents, a feature that still has to be fully acknowledged in much of the literature.'⁵³ Fully 14 per cent of the ss/sa members studied and 11 per cent of the remaining party members reflect full-scale paranoia.⁵⁴ In other words, one would expect them to fully believe, constantly espouse, and act upon, the Nazi antisemitic madness. 'It is hard to imagine', writes Merkl, 'a reasonably perceptive, mature person who would join the nsdap without being fully aware of its chief issue.'⁵⁵

    What does this tell us about the society in which the enunciators of such madness were able to move from the political gutter into the corridors of power? The point is not to determine what percentage of Germans shared the paranoia of the most rabid Nazis – studies focused on individuals neglect the fact that political parties do not merely reflect, but also crystallize, focus and shape individual feelings. As

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 41

much as any party can, the Nazis at that moment gained hegemony over German society. At the very least the Nazi ascendancy indicated that there was a widespread acceptance of their racist and paranoid rantings as legitimate political discourse; whether it had majority support or not, an antisemitic course had become acceptable politics. Their enemies' paralysis, their fragmentation and defeat without an all-out struggle, meant their acquiescence before such evil. If before 1933 the paranoiacs dominated the Nazi movement, after 1933 they dominated German society – meaning that their vision of reality and course of action became prevalent. Did the Nazis reflect German society? In politics, such dominance is the ultimate truth.

    Thus it is hardly likely that most Germans were surprised when the first government-sanctioned anti-Jewish boycott took place, two months after Hitler became Chancellor. Indeed, Karl A. Schleunes, argues persuasively that the boycott, threatening as it did Hitler's precarious modus vivendi with Hindenburg and the non-Nazis in his cabinet, was organized as a way of channelling and disciplining powerful grass-roots party pressures.⁵⁶ The pressures continued, leading to each further step towards the solution of the 'Jewish Problem': the antisemitic legislation beginning with the expulsion of Jews from the civil service on 7 April 1933, the Nürnberg Laws of 1935, the Aryanizations (expropriations) of 1937-38, and Kristallnacht – the nationwide pogrom of 9 November 1938.

From Antisemitism to the Final Solution

Antisemitism, no matter how hegemonic, does not amount to extermination. The stubborn argument for Hitler's primary responsibility in this project recurs in Bullock's conclusion that 'if ever a man exercised absolute power it was Adolf Hitler.'⁵⁷ This appraisal is mirrored in the extreme emphasis virtually all Nazi officials associated with the Final Solution have given to 'obeying orders'. And they are right, in one sense: Nazism was Führer-worship. Self-effacement before ant unquestioning obedience to Hitler was indeed a cornerstone of the movement. As Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, testified: 'I had no second thoughts at the time; I had received an order and had to carry it out. When the Führer himself had ordered the 'Final Solu-

42

tion" of the Jewish question, no long-standing National-Socialist could have second thoughts, least of all an ss officer. "Führer, befehl, wir folgen" – Führer, command, we follow thee – was for us no empty phrase, no mere slogan. We took it with deadly seriousness.'⁵⁸

    What are we to answer to Höss? That to elevate an individual to supreme authority, with such a massive evasion of responsibility, is in itself a deliberate action? Was there not in such subjection a preexisting acceptance of Hitler's intentions as Höss's own, a precognition of what Hitler would command, a way of muting consciousness of the barbarism that was thereby chosen?

    The point is, after all, that process cannot be separated from content. It says a great deal about the Germans who obeyed that they chose obedience. For example, to join the Nazi party, to vote for it, to capitulate before it – each step meant an abandonment of reason. To choose the party and leader who would destroy parliamentary democracy was not like choosing a superior form of workers' democracy that would more fully realize the rationalist and egalitarian promises of parliamentary rule. It was to reject any and all democratic, rationalist, and egalitarian commitments. It meant embracing instead the charismatic leader whose unique, almost mystical powers would direct those who had abandoned reason as a guide.

    A choice of unreason, and a choice of evil. After all, the very word of this man, a man of manifestly evil intentions, became the supreme law of German society. In achieving this position, wasn't Hitler giving voice to the malignancy, the irrationality of the social forces that brought him to power? And wasn't his ascendancy a sign of the malignancy and irrationality of a society which could produce no other leading force?

    Moreover, it distorts the course of events to describe the locus of the Final Solution as being Hitler. Among Nazis there was general agreement about the 'Jewish Problem': how could it be solved? Schleunes guides us through the prewar period, showing how policies and actions evolved in fits and starts, from a number of centres of action, but were unsuccessful in removing 'the Jew' from German life. Only if we take seriously the Nazi paranoia about the demonic Jewish threat to the Aryan race, can we understand why the need for a solution should have been felt so urgently.

    And yet what real solution was there, once total emigration was ruled out because no country was willing to receive the Jews? As

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 43

Yehuda Bauer argues, 'the idea of a mass murder of the Jews was the logical consequence of Nazi theories', once emigration became impossible.⁵⁹ Logical: each step, from boycott to legislation to Aryanization to ghettoization further separated Jews from Germans, but in the end the Jews' destructive and demonic threat would only be removed if they were removed.⁶⁰

    As Ernst Nolte suggests, Hitler's lieutenants may well have shrunk back from the consequences of their wishes and wants, because they were not totally without decency. 'They combated the Jews, but they failed to recognize that even a complete emigration, according to the intrinsic meaning of the National Socialist doctrine, could not accomplish any genuinely essential changes. No wonder they became the prey of the more logically consistent mind.'⁶¹ Hitler incarnated, especially in the Final Solution, the utter consistency of the racism around which German society had come to be organized. By achieving absolute power he was able to carry this theology to its logical conclusion.

Who Is Responsible?

How far can we now generalize beyond Hitler, his circle, and the ss troops involved – beyond even the Nazi movement and its supporters – in attributing the Final Solution to German society or Germany? It is true that no matter how hard we look beyond Hitler we never see more than a relative handful of key actors. But this tells us more about our century's machinery of destruction than about the man Hitler and the German nation-state. Those who could win control over the machinery and organize society around it, needed in the end only a relative handful of obedient servants to operate it. Hitler, we may say, got all the cooperation that was needed.

    If genocide can be performed by strikingly few, it is no less striking how many accomplices it requires. Hundreds of thousands were asked only for their complicity, and gave it. Whether or not they desired to exterminate the Jews, they certainly acted, in the only ways that mattered, to bring that end about. Similarly, those who had voted Nazi, whatever reasons they might give, had acted in the ways available to them to bring to power a movement incorporating violence, obedience, antisemitism, militarism, and unreason. The

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two and a half million who joined the Nazis by 1935 more directly endorsed and participated in the movement. All those who became agents and beneficiaries of the antisemitic policies must also be numbered among the accomplices, as must those who knew what was being done to the Jews after 1941 but acquiesced. Even more directly connected are the hundreds of thousands who, though neither directing the Final Solution nor guarding the camps, provided the machinery through which it took place: those disposing of the victims' property, taking inventories of their gold teeth, manufacturing and shipping gas, performing the voluminous paperwork, directing and profiting from the starving labourers. In the end millions acted and assented: those who knew it was happening but let it continue, as well as those who aided and abetted it more directly. They all bear a share of the responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.

    Certainly the average German – let us say, the spd voter who withdrew after 1933 and kept to himself – is no more responsible for the Final Solution than the average American was responsible for the laying waste of Vietnam. Certainly no more, but also no less. Not only all those who participated in one or another phase of the preparation for genocide, or in the Final Solution itself, but also all those who knowingly accepted without opposition their society's actions thereby made those actions their own. The Nazis did not demand active involvement; having reduced the population to passivity they needed only complicity. Already in some sense theirs in historical origin – just as the technological hubris that destroyed Vietnam is a part of American national identity – the Final Solution further came to belong to tens of millions in Germany and elsewhere by virtue of their silent acquiescence.

    To be sure, Nazi Germany was ruled by terror, and opposition meant grave consequences. The concentration camp system had originated as a way of detaining opponents of the regime. There were many who inwardly opposed what was done to the Jews, but went along because they felt they had to.⁶² On this level Milgram's experiment is illuminating. The military, for example, was whipped into subservience to Hitler's policy, and many of the millions of military and civilian accomplices must have been decent people who hated Nazism but saw no alternative to obedience to their society's rulers. Nazi Germany, after all, was a society whose policy from the beginning was deliberately and systematically to transform its citizens

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 45

into passive agents.⁶³

    One of the most remarkable facts about the Nazi extermination of Jews is that it proceeded virtually without incident or opposition among Germans. Opportunities were certainly available to resist, sabotage, or at least undermine, the Final Solution.⁶⁴ It was more than terror, or merely obedience, that caused the exterminations to be carried out so efficiently and be accepted so silently by the citizens of the Third Reich. After all, it was open resistance (culminating in Cardinal Galen's famous sermon), which led the Nazis to abandon their euthanasia programme.

    Similarly, even under 'totalitarian' rule most of Germany's seventy million faithful sullenly let die the Nazi pagan 'Faith Movement'. Yet the many and complex steps preparing for and carrying out the Final Solution were taken virtually without incident.⁶⁵ Certainly, opposition to the other Nazi projects had developed in peacetime, and they threatened 'Aryans' themselves; while the extermination programme was secret, took place in wartime, and involved 'non-Aryans'. But the overwhelming mood towards the relatively few outcast and then departing Jews seemed to be, if not outright hostility then at least indifference to their fate.⁶⁶

    After all, was the Final Solution not rooted in a millennial Christian history of antisemitism, given new focus by recent German history? Did not the Nazis take power on a programme of antisemitism, behind a leader obsessed by it and who gave frequent warning of his intentions? And hadn't the militaristic racists defeated their opponents politically by 1933? And did not their new order proceed, as promised, to organize itself psychologically, socially, economically and culturally for war and expansion and against the Jews? From the start did it not carry out persecution, disenfranchisement, expropriation, and pogrom, and was not this accepted by millions of Germans? And was there not available in the ss – those claiming after all to be the best, the purest Germans in a racial state – a cadre willing to destroy the Jews? And did not this operation proceed with staggering efficiency? Taken together these by-now rhetorical questions point towards another: was not the extermination of the Jews as much an outgrowth of German history and society as the Nazis themselves? If we would understand why the Jews were exterminated these reflections point us not towards Hitler's psyche alone, but towards the social soil in which such evil became ascendant.

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The Heritage of Defeat

What radical social pathology led to and was expressed in the radical extermination programme? The secret which accompanied Germany into the years of inflation and depression was its history of defeat – not only widely resented defeat at the hands of the Allies in the First World War but that of the peasants three hundred years earlier, that of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, and that of the proletariat after the war.

    If one step in this history was the peasants' defeat by the aristocrats in the sixteenth century, another was the later aristocratic reaction to modernization. They squeezed the peasants harder rather than leading a drive for genuine modernization of the kind which, in the case of England, broke the peasantry as a social force and drew the aristocracy and bourgeoisie close together. By 1848 the constellation of forces had become such that no bourgeois-democratic revolution was possible: the latter knew defeat in advance. Paraphrasing Marx, Barrington Moore sketches the resulting bourgeoisie: 'a commercial and industrial class which is too weak and dependent to take power and rule in its own right and which therefore throws itself into the arms of the landed aristocracy and the loyal bureaucracy, exchanging the right to rule for the right to make money.'⁶⁷ They were too few, too timid, and too weak; the aristocracy was too strong and, soon, would become the only effective safeguard against the rising proletariat.

    To say that the bourgeoisie never triumphed in Germany is to say far more than meets the eye. Moore helps us to see how a mad political outlook had already developed in the late nineteenth century and could become a mass phenomenon in the twentieth because, in 1848, the then-rational one had been defeated. The lower middle class developed the furious will and strength to run amok because, a century earlier, their regressive hopes had not been liquidated by an ascending bourgeoisie. No matter how brutally, he argues, the American, French, and British bourgeoisie contributed to gradualism and democracy by successfully making society over in their image. Certainly, they did this to serve their own interest; but they functioned simultaneously as a modernizing, progressive force which, for a time, led and furthered humanity's struggle for freedom and dignity. Their revolution against the feudal world could become

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 47

'everyone's' only because it was a relatively humanizing, civilizing, and democratizing struggle. The country of the Final Solution was one in which industrialization, the fundamental economic advance, took place without the parallel human, political, social, and cultural advance embodied in constitutional government, an effective parliament, revocation of aristocratic privileges and the victory of new ideas of human dignity and political equality. A decisive revolutionary rupture with the past in the service of the present and future never happened in Germany, even though it industrialized virtually overnight.⁶⁸

Antisemitism and Völkisch Thought

The key to German society's 'illness', to its 'distorted social development' was the defeat of the social forces that might have brought progress in human terms – a more democratic government, a more equal society, a more humane and rationalistic outlook – to accompany breakneck technological and economic progress. On the ideological level this defeat left open space for regressive and anti-rational outlooks to assume a legitimacy and currency unthinkable where successful revolutions had assured the hegemony of values such as reason, equality and progress. At the same time the irresolution and lack of congruence between and within the social, legal, political, economic and educational realms generated tensions which promoted ever more virulent strains of such thought. Regressive outlooks are present in any industrializing society, but in Germany the irrationalist and antisemitic protest against modernity was strong and widespread enough to be a contender for ideological dominance.

    We must understand what this means – that prejudice became paranoia. People who hated the coming of the modern world believed what they said when they blamed it on the Jews as the people of the city, of the political and cultural vanguard, of internationalism and commerce.⁶⁹ And they were taken seriously, as age-old Christian antisemitism became absorbed and reshaped into this new current of protest.

    In 1880 200,000 students signed a petition calling for the exclusion of ,Jews from government service, public and professional life in Germany. As George L. Mosse points out, antisemitism, anti-

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modernism and völkisch (i.e. romantic folkish) thought – generally united in a single outlook – became 'commonplace bourgeois notions' in the late nineteenth century.⁷⁰ Espoused by respected thinkers and academicians like the historian Treitschke, this current did more than develop claims to scientific, moral and political legitimacy: 'The fact is that schools dominated by the völkisch ideology were so numerous as to constitute the centre rather than the fringe of German education.'⁷¹

    How secure were the Bismarckian reforms, including emancipation of the Jews, in a climate in which the antisemitic völkisch outlook 'had permeated much of the nation' even before Hitler came on the scene?⁷² Reforms were not won as the fruit of popular struggles, but imposed from above.⁷³ Not achieved through a real defeat of pre-bourgeois social forces, they rested therefore on shaky soil. This climate of uncertainty, concealed beneath the spectacular rise of German industrial capitalism and of the German socialist movement, is remarkably symbolized in a passage from a letter written in 1917 by Walter Rathenau, then director of General Electric Company, to Mrs von Hindenburg: 'Although myself and my ancestors have served our country as best as we could, I am, as you would presumably know, as a Jew a second-class citizen.'⁷⁴

The Moment of Truth

Nevertheless, it seemed for some time that Germany was the world's most modern and potentially most revolutionary society. It seemed also – among Jews – that assimilation and not antisemitism was the real 'Jewish problem' in Germany.⁷⁵ But the real weakness of its progressive forces was revealed. Less in the stampede to war in 1914 – which was, after all, universal – than in the defeated revolution and deadlock following the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and discrediting of the feudal aristocracy. The heritage of defeat here reappears in an especially vicious form: the betrayal of a class by its own party leaders.

    1918 was the most propitious moment yet for a decisive victory of 'modernity' in Germany. The military was demoralized by the allied victory and the workers had declared a republic. Even if not a socialist republic, a liberal democracy was in the offing which might

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 49

forever sweep away the pre-bourgeois forces from German life. To achieve this the Social Democratic government would, in Moore's words 'have had to get to work at once to take control of the armed forces, the administrative bureaucracy, and the judiciary, remoulding them as instruments loyal to the Republic. It would have had to adopt an economic policy that included a degree of government control over certain areas of heavy industry, with some concessions to the workers over conditions on the shop floor. In doing all that, the government would have had to be willing to forestall the National Assembly by taking a series of essentially irreversible decisions necessary as the foundation for a liberal and democratic version of capitalism.'⁷⁶

    The social basis for this vigorous policy existed in the militant and active revolutionary movement, organized into workers' councils. But the Social Democratic leaders did not seek to change the 'wrong, outdated, anachronistic distribution of power'⁷⁷ among the classes of German society. Sebastian Haffner concludes that Fritz Ebert, the spd leader 'did not want a republic, he wanted to save the monarchy'.⁷⁸ Hating the revolution 'like sin', Ebert sought to share power with the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. His and the spd's main animus became directed not against the old order, but against the repeated risings of workers.⁷⁹ In the end, during the revolutionary wave, the spd not only failed to push for a liberal democratic programme but accepted, rehabilitated and made common cause with the old bureaucracy and aristocracy against the workers themselves.

    No wonder that while administering the state apparatus, even at the height of a wave of popularity which gave them eleven million votes in 1919, the spd made no effort to gain real control of it. Why? Perhaps Moore's description of the bourgeoisie of 1848 can be slightly altered and so made apposite for the spd of 1918 and after: the party which represented the majority of the working class was too weak and dependent to take power and rule in its own right and therefore threw itself into the arms of the bourgeoisie, the discredited landed aristocracy and the bureaucracy. It exchanged the right to rule and to reshape Germany for the right to further workers' interests under a revived old order.

    One can scarcely exaggerate the effect of this failed revolution on subsequent events. Germany was in a constitutional crisis of the

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deepest sort; yet the one force which could have decisively swept aside pre-bourgeois social classes, institutions and ideology had been defeated. More than defeated: betrayed by its own leaders in collusion with the old order, the working class was now split into two parties. It was in the anomalous position of being formally 'in power' while its leaders continued to call on volunteer soldiers – the Freikorps – to put down workers' risings. On the other hand, of course, the old aristocracy and bureaucracy hated the 'Marxist' republic which had been manipulated into negotiating a humiliating peace, while the army remained intact and undefeated. In as much as the Freikorps led to the Nazi stormtroopers, the nonrevolutionary spd republic was saved by those who would soon become its own gravediggers.

    If the parties of the working class did not exercise real power after the war, the old order was historically played out, unable now to unite Germany even under a military dictatorship. At the same time, nationalism was intensified by a humiliating and economically draining peace, and by French occupation of the Ruhr. The peace was both too severe and not severe enough,⁸⁰ because it humiliated the old order yet allowed the retention of its minions intact – especially the bureaucracy and military. For all its limits, socialism had had a corrosive effect on the old Germany by bringing the masses to the centre of the historical stage, so that in the Republic the old nationalist and aristocratic parties had become irrelevant. The army remained perhaps the most significant force to be reckoned with under Weimar, yet it too was no longer able to rule. Not strong enough to assume hegemony in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie was now structurally even less able to take leadership in a society where socialism was already on the agenda. The worsening political stalemate of the Weimar republic thus reflected a social crisis in which no traditional class was capable of asserting hegemony either by itself or in coalition. One could scarcely imagine a more welcoming soil for the völkisch, anti-modern, irrationalist outlook to be turned into a mass-based political party.

The Lower Middle Class and National Socialism

The party that emerged owed its origin, nature and phenomenal

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 51

growth to many things: defeat, failed revolution and constitutional crisis, the deep penetration of the antisemitic and völkisch outlook, and the postwar economic crises. In the postwar peace settlement Germany had lost 13 per cent of its prewar territory, 10 per cent of its people, 15 per cent of its arable land, 75 per cent of its iron ore deposits, 44 per cent of its pig iron capacity, 38 per cent of its steel and 26 per cent of its coal capacity. Inflation, tied to the punitive reparations Germany had to pay the Allies, exploded the life savings of many of the hard working and thrifty between 1919 and 1923. After a period of stability the Depression struck, bringing unemployment rates of over 30 per cent by 1932. The Nazis had dropped from 6.5 per cent of the vote in May 1924 to 3.0 per cent that December, and then to 2.6 per cent in 1928. But in the 1930 elections Nazi support skyrocketed to 18.3 per cent, giving them the second largest delegation to the Reichstag.

    Barrington Moore confirms that the nsdap was indeed largely the party of the lower middle class – the 'little men', including teachers, small merchants, white-collar employees and officials, farmers and self-employed craftsmen.⁸¹ Who were these people? The first thing that leaps to the eye, in the studies by Theodore Abel in the 1930s, and Milton Mayer in the 1950s, is that most of their subjects appear quite ordinary and conventional. 'There is little to be found in them', says Peter Merkl of Abel's respondents, 'that seems sinister or ominous. And yet the consequences of their common foibles, errors, and delusions cost an estimated fifty million human lives and untold destruction and misery.'⁸²

    If there is a direct line of mad rage from Mein Kampf through the Nazi movement's tactics and actual behaviour in power to the Final Solution, it is not immediately evident in these people. They are overly sentimental, ardent nationalists respectful of hard work and honesty, authoritarian and antisemitic. As Barrington Moore describes the respondents in Abel's study, their values are those of early competitive capitalism, they are 'petty bourgeois rather than bourgeois . . . with a strong overlay of both bureaucratic and even feudal features.⁸³ They are people we can understand and sympathize with, rather than savages from the political gutter.

Hitler himself was patently one of these 'little men'. His jerkiness, exaggerated gestures and insecurity were those of one who lacks the grace and self-confidence learned through operating the levers that

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reproduce society. His writing reads like that of an autodidact lacking training, culture and polish. He was filled with resentment towards his betters, and indeed towards the whole world. He lacked faith in the future and longed to have been born 'earlier'.

    Certainly idealizing the past or one's childhood does not prefigure evil to come, even if it does show desire to withdraw from a traumatic present. The same is true of intense nationalism. But the Nazis absorbed these attitudes into National Socialism, which is a definite leap beyond the more ordinary kinds of irrationality. In its deep structure it is a contradiction in terms. The worker who tells his story in Abel's account shows the irreconcilable pressure of idealized family and fatherland on the one side, and his experience and identification as a worker on the other. We can see his 'synthesis' of reactionary sentiment and class struggle in his acceptance of National Socialism. Its inherent inauthenticity was his authentic resolution. Abel's other essays show people living under similar enormous pressures, ten-signs, blockages and contradictions who chose to 'resolve' their situation by leaping beyond it, either towards the chimera of National Socialism, by faith in the absolute leader, or by fixating upon 'the Jew' supposedly 'polluting' their blood or defiling their race.⁸⁴

    As an outlook, National Socialism represents a fantastic joining of two irreconcilables. Nationalism united all classes, socialism sprang from class struggle; nationalism needed a foreign enemy, socialism claimed to be internationalist; nationalism deeply respected existing authority, socialism sought (in people's minds at least) to overthrow it. As a mass movement, Nazism was deeply marked by social-democratic aspirations and the workers' struggles against class society. This philosophy of the 'little man' who wants to leave society as it is begins by articulating enormous resentment against wealth and privilege, only to end by effacing this resentment in the larger community of the fatherland.⁸⁵ Its inherent illogic is such that it can be held together as outlook and movement only by three recourses: to an absolute leader, who will mystically cement together the otherwise irreconcilable by force of personality; to aggressive national expansion, as the only way of creating the material means for a 'socialism' providing economic benefits for the workers and poor without disturbing existing economic structures too much; and to virulent antisemitism, as the main defining pole of a Germanic fantasy-community for which class boundaries were irrelevant.⁸⁶ As

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an outlook National Socialism was not only articulated without style or grace, as Neumann pointed out,⁸⁷ but it was also contradictory, illogical, and founded on a systematic distortion of reality. Because Nazism could not be rational it aggressively promoted the rejection of reason itself, and based itself instead on regression.

    Regression was one of the strongest currents of Nazism: its explicit goal was to return to the past. In fact, the movement coalesced around a virulent hatred for modernity. According to Nazi ideology the alienated, depersonalized, faceless twentieth-century world was to be reversed in the pure Völkisch state. Medieval virtues, especially of physical prowess, would be given a central place. The peasant, the tiller of the soil rooted in nature, would be honoured once more, and craftsmanship would become socially important again. Irrationalism and obedience to the leader were to replace Enlightenment notions of reason and political democracy. Women would be returned to their role of home-maker, mother and helpmeet for the Aryan warrior.

    The very notion of the Volk, so central to Nazism, was a deliberate regression from what was seen as the cosmopolitanism and internationalism of the modern world. The Jews were hated primarily as bearers of modernity: an international people, an urban people, adept in the ways of modern capitalism and often proponents of socialism as well. Elemental values common to liberal democracy and socialism – such as equality, civil rights and liberties, the dignity of all people, the importance of rational deliberation and democratic decision-making, rule by law – were violently rejected by Nazi ideology and practice.⁸⁸ On the very first page of Mein Kampf Hitler introduced a key reversal of both bourgeois and socialist dreams for international peace and respect between nations: through conquest the German Volk would increase their daily bread, using swords as ploughshares. Against the panoply of slowly developed civilized values was asserted a brutal vision of Aryan domination: survival of the fittest, subservience to authority, and 'blood purity'.

    These analyses take Nazi ideology seriously. We have learned that antisemitism, as the pivot of this ideology, must be taken equally seriously. These key strands of Nazism perpetuated the rejection of modernity and rationalism found in nineteenth-century romantic thought, but they gave it a new active and violent mass character. What was also new in Nazism was its political specificity – it blamed

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Versailles and the Jews for the actual suffering of Germans in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it physically attacked Jews, broke up meetings, engaged in violent demonstrations, street fighting and political assassinations. And, as its Ideology and actions gathered support, it sought political power. The 'little man' gave Nazism the dynamism, force, and organizational strength to Impose its will upon a Germany in crisis, with decisive assistance from the military and large capital. For all other classes it was not the right time: they were either timid, without a popular base, defeated, or obsolescent. The 'little man' alone sought and acquired power.

The 'Little Man' in Power

He did it in a characteristic way, however: by surrendering all power to Adolf Hitler, by abandoning the heart of his social and economic programme, by compromising with his betters and projecting his impotent rage away from this situation. Nazism was a 'socialism' which, in power, would not attack the capitalists, which deeply respected authority, and buried class struggle in aggressive expansion and hatred of the Jews. The point is that the profoundly unrevolutionary yet highly explosive character of this 'fools' socialism' reflected the fundamentally impotent structural position of the lower middle class. The years after 1933 verify that the Nazi project – to guarantee the social status of the Mittelstand and protect it against both the working class and capital was, as Kühnl has said, 'objectively illusory'. The 'little man's' energies were 'directed towards the restoration of a past historical situation and social structure which has long been superseded by the development of the productive forces.'⁸⁹

    In other words, economically and technologically Germany's problems and needs had become those of an advanced capitalist society. Their inherent distance from the real levers of effective social power is expressed in the fact that, by themselves, the social forces of Nazism were incapable of grasping the last rung on the ladder to political power. Without Reichswehr and bourgeois acceptance the Nazis would have remained forever suspended between a hopeless putschism on the one hand and their one third of the vote on the other. The fact that Hitler was invited into office by Hindenburg In 1933 is more than symbolic: other classes, in other societies, have

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 55

had the means and the will to take power against their national bourgeoisies and/or military forces. By contrast the very unrevolutionary thrust of 'revolutionary' Nazism suggests, among other things, that its leading group, even if it produced a Hitler and entered the halls of power, could never be genuinely dominant.

    Why? The nature of the lower middle class was to depend structurally on large capital – socially, economically and ideologically. Its desires to turn back the clock remained purely subjective. Having no authentic – that is to say, independent and potentially realizable – long-term political, social or economic interests of its own, it was indeed as incapable of actual rule as it was of seizing power on its own.

    But after all, did not the Nazis take power in one way or another, bringing tens of thousands of their own into leading positions, and did not Hitler utterly dominate Germany – including, finally, the military, the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie? We can see this process unfold in Allen's account of Thalberg between 1930 and 1935, and it explains why Mosse uses revolution without inverted commas to refer to the Nazi takeover and its aftermath.⁹⁰ Indeed, did they not worship power, and exercise it – to promote German recovery, to create a totalitarian society, to expand by the threat of war, to conquer Europe with the most powerful war machine ever developed, and ultimately to assume the power of life and death over whole peoples?

    But these were products of an all-powerful impotence. The Nazis were structurally incapable of doing the one thing that really mattered to their social class: undoing history. The paradox is vividly demonstrated in the Nazi treatment of department stores, a process that must have puzzled so many of Hitler's loyal supporters.

    No capitalist institution had been as prominently attacked along the Nazis' road to power as the largely Jewish-owned department stores – this was in keeping with the necessarily superficial 'anti-capitalism' of a class which would attack its larger, more modern and efficient competitors – especially if they were Jews – but not the very market and property system of which it hoped to remain a respected part. After 30 January 1933, many of the anticipated steps were taken against department stores. Exceptionally high taxes were levied on turnover. Jewish stores were boycotted. Permanent limits were placed on chain and department store expansion. Department

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stores were excluded from handling certain profitable government and party business, and were boycotted repeatedly by various party groups. The failure rate of their apprentices before local examining boards rose appreciably, and the press and the mails discriminated against their advertising.

    But, as the policy of a fundamental non-revolutionary government, these could only be temporary or half measures, taken ambivalently. Rapid economic recovery within the existing order, a vital need of the Nazi regime, depended on encouraging the most efficient – in this case, the largest, most highly developed – economic forms. Corporate capitalist realities undercut petty-bourgeois dreams as the banks, industry and government officials all saw the necessity of keeping the department stores healthy. Already in July 1933, the Reich Minister of Economics decreed for example that two large Jewish chains, which now had huge government investments, could not be allowed to go under. By 1936 turnover at the large stores had risen back to 86 per cent of that of 1932. By 1938 the threats had been removed, if not the formal restrictions. A 1935 official Party statement criticized the inadequacies of small shops, emphasizing that retail outlets where working people could buy cheaply did not deserve discrimination if maintaining the standard of living was the most important economic objective. Thus did the Nazi 'revolution' capitulate to the priorities of modern capitalist society, which it had no serious intention of dismantling.⁹¹

    The vicissitudes of Nazi policy towards department stores reflect the fact that a non-socialist movement of 'little men', even if it held state power, could develop no sensible alternative to furthering the interests of monopoly capitalism.⁹² As Poulantzas has argued, this was indeed a secret of fascism: it 'acclerates the consolidation and stabilization of the economic supremacy of big finance capital over the other dominant class and class fractions. But this is by no means to be interpreted as meaning that fascism represents the economic interests of big capital "exclusively". Fascism, rather, operates in the economic sense, as a factor neutralizing the contradictions among those classes and fractions, while regulating development to ensure the exclusive domination of the big capital.'⁹³ This 'exclusive domination' did not give large capitalists a free hand – rather, they had to submit to what Neumann called a 'command economy' in which Hitler's priorities ruled to such an extent that some authors

Why? Towards a Theory of the Holocaust 57

have ridiculed the idea that capitalism was favoured under the Nazis. But to argue the point of whether (Nazi) politics or (bourgeois) economics was in command during the Third Reich is to miss the forest for the trees: a society need not be commanded by big capital to serve the latter's fundamental interests. Even if the logic of his course led him there, serving the interests of big capital was not the main mission of Adolf Hitler.⁹⁴ Driven repeatedly into the arms of the bourgeoisie, Nazism continued to dream of going backwards to a more hospitable time but was carried forward by deeper currents than it could ever comprehend. The inevitable 'compromise' between Nazism's original base and military and economic realities was brutally announced on 30 June 1934, on 'The Night of Long Knives' which destroyed the Nazi 'Left'. For all the talk of revolution during the Nazi era and by historians since, basic property relations were not even questioned, the corporate sector became ever more the lynch-pin of the economy, and the German capitalism that rose from the ashes after 1945 had stunning continuity with that of Weimar and the Third Reich.

    Economically speaking, fascism's hidden historical role may have been to create an alliance between monopoly capital and the 'little men', but this was accomplished only by intensifying the contradictions between them to the disadvantage of the latter.⁹⁵ For Adolf Hitler's social class, the Third Reich was a disaster. The Germany of 1939, as David Schoenbaum summarizes its results, confounded all expectations: 'Objective social reality, the measurable statistical consequences of National Socialism, was the very opposite of what Hitler had presumably promised and what the majority of his followers had expected him to fulfil. In 1939, the cities were larger, not smaller; the concentration of capital greater than before: the rural population reduced, not increased; women not at the fireside but in the office and the factory; the inequality of income and property distribution more, not less conspicuous; industry's share of the gross national product up and agriculture's down, while industrial labour had it relatively good and small business increasingly bad.'⁹⁶ In the command economy all of this took place deliberately: wages and prices were controlled, large farms and estates were encouraged, migration from country to town and town to city was permitted, women were encouraged to work.⁹⁷ In other words, while railing against the modern world, Hitler, like all fascists, was a great modernizer.⁹⁸

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Impotence in power

My point is not that fascism served the bourgeoisie, which it did, after all, only by commanding it and by plunging Germany into total war. Nor is it that the 'little man' was swindled during the Third Reich, which he was. But, above all, as Bloch said of the peasant, the petty bourgeois was 'situated in an older place'.⁹⁹ The 'swindle' confirmed that as a class, the petty bourgeoisie had no programme. That is, no programme which could be put into effect in the Germany of the 1930s. Its rabid desire to turn back the clock represented a fundamental historical impotence, and thus could only be 'achieved' symbolically through a mad break with that reality.

    Impotent? As I have emphasized, one of the most striking characteristics of Nazism was Hitler's power lust. The worship of the Führer already promoted in Mein Kampf was central to the conversion of so many to Nazism, and was built into the movement's ethos and electoral appeal. In power, Hitler took every step possible to achieve absolute power. The German state attained unparalleled domination over the Western world. How do these undeniable facts square with my emphasis on the impotence of the social class upon which the movement was built?

    In the most basic social sense, the Nazi obsession with power only confirmed their lack of it. This points us towards the terrible fracture in German society in which the class which sought and then held political power was unable to dispose over the prevailing technical-economic complex to achieve any socially meaningful goal.

    The nature of Nazi power is the decisive consideration. Certainly any sophisticated discussion of Nazism has to acknowledge the relative autonomy of the political from the economic apparatus, and recognize that at this decisive moment in history power in one realm did not automatically translate to power in the other.¹⁰⁰ A key but generally unposed question about power is the congruence of an aspiring social force with society's actual level of development.

    As Bloch said: 'Not all people exist in the same now.'¹⁰¹ Those who clamoured for a return to the past rejected, and ultimately took a kind of suicidal vengeance on, the twentieth-century world. They were, in Bloch's term, a 'non-synchronous remainder' living a 'non-synchronous contradiction'. The primary problem was not that the German lower middle class turned to Nazism in droves but that it

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existed in the first place as a particularly regressive social constellation retaining political and ideological legitimacy in the fatal conjuncture of the 1920s and 1930s. Bloch speaks of 'synchronous contradictions' in which the 'impeded future' contained in the Now can be set free by a social class whose being is synchronous with the possibilities of this 'impeded technical benefaction'.¹⁰² No political force, try as it may, can reshape a society against its actual historical possibilities. If it can indeed cripple or destroy the society, there is no wishing away the realities of an attained level of historical development. Even the ruler of Germany's totalitarian state was impotent to achieve the illusory aims of his class in the face of its fundamental historical weakness – in the face of the inappropriateness of its goals to the prevailing economic-technical complex and its possibilities. In that society, only a genuinely alternative movement in power could have avoided the economic fate of Nazism, its ultimate acquiescence to the structural limits imposed by German capitalism even as it commanded it. Genuine power is socially effective power: the ability to shape society in accord with its actual possibilities, to move confidently towards the future, to be congruent by orientation and disposition with the demands of this society. The Nazis lacked all of these. The ascendancy of this class was the most sinister reflection of a situation in which no other social class was sufficiently strong or sufficiently hegemonic to rule, and the movement able to grab state power was based (in Fritz Stern's words) on a 'wild leap from political reality'.¹⁰³

    We have seen that the 'wild leap' had already been taken from the very beginning of Nazism in Mein Kampf; indeed it received its shape long before, in the middle of the nineteenth century. If the projection of all of Germany's problems onto the Jews was already built into Nazism this testifies to the incongruence of the 'little men' with the advanced capitalist world. This meant that forces rooted more authentically in that world, like monopoly capital, were bound to triumph when it was a question of hard economic realities, such as ending the depression or preparing for war.

    Nevertheless, this virulent outlook had already achieved a certain autonomy from its social sources, was a 'normal' current of German life, and could be reshaped into a legitimate political programme. Their despair about the present, the impossible project of revising history, the redemption of the Volk, the turn to unreason, and the

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fixation on the Jews as the cause of all evil – each step of this wild leap constituted part of the appeal of Nazism. The other part was its determination to do something about all of this. Once the Nazis were in power, this determination would meet the limits of reality.

The Final Solution

From the beginning the Nazi enragés represented the impossibility of reshaping the twentieth century to the tastes and needs of the Mittelstand; they stood for the urge to retreat from a world they hated, and the impossibility of that retreat. They also represented the mad and evil visions of victory which grew out of this feverish, yet sterile soil. After 1933 the Nazis possessed the political power – and military and technological means – with which to try to carry out this retreat imagined as a victory.

    Retreat imagined as a victory: this is after all, the meaning of the torchlight parades, the burning of books, the creation of a specifically 'Aryan' culture, the great rallies and celebrations. But none of this could pacify either the pain which had driven the lower middle class onto the political stage – which must only have intensified as their actual social and economic situation worsened – or the antisemitic rage which was its insane product. Given the inevitability of its failure on every other level, Nazism could succeed only by addressing and solving 'the Jewish problem'.

    This is why the logic of Nazism leads to the Final Solution. It seems clear that no one, even Adolf Hitler, fully and consciously grasped that this is where the rupture with reality by his impotent class would lead. In their first years of power, writes Schleunes, the Nazis 'stumbled' towards a solution. Each step was an improvisation, a response to specific pressures and situations, and each step led to a further impasse. 'They were certain only that a solution was necessary. This commitment carried the Nazi system along the twisted road to Auschwitz.'¹⁰⁴

    The extermination of six million Jews, successfully eliminating Jews from most of Central and Eastern Europe, was the Nazis' one great victory. The Final Solution reflects impotence in power. In radically fulfilling the dream of völkisch antisemitism it was the act of those who, having no effective power to shape the social world, still

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disposed over the political and military might to try to destroy the force allegedly at the source of its evils. This logic, inherent in Nazism from its origin, was finally stated by Hitler in 1939 and put into action by him in 1941 or 1942.¹⁰⁵ As Germany's defeat in the war became at first possible, then likely, then inevitable, the extermination apparatus only intensified its mission. As the prospect of real victory faded, their mad project to save civilization from the Jewish demon only accelerated. By exterminating the people who incarnated it, evil could still be destroyed. Only in this barbaric way could the 'little man' become the master race.

Unfit for the Modern World or Part of It?

In conclusion, what is the source of the impotent and mad rage that led to the Holocaust? Much about Nazism seems to dispute my analyses of it as a lower middle class phenomenon. From the beginning the party proclaimed itself beyond class conflict, seeking to harmonize proletarian and bourgeois in the Aryan state. However deluded, its primary object was the well-being of all Germans, irrespective of class. Moreover, it called itself not only the 'National Socialist' but the 'German Workers' Party'. And in fact, by 1935 over a quarter of its membership were industrial workers – the largest number (662,000) of any occupational category in the 2.5 million member party.¹⁰⁶ This leads us to the root question: was Nazism the response of a 'backward' class resisting integration into the modern world,¹⁰⁷ or did it rather reflect a rage towards that world by those already accustomed and acculturated to it? Was the real root of the problem that Germany, industrializing later than Britain, developed unevenly, its older social layers put into exaggerated tension with its newer ones until an explosion was reached?

    For Bloch the central characteristic of Nazism was that it emerged from 'non-synchronous' people – remnants of earlier social forms who persisted into a present for which they were unfit. 'If misery only afflicted synchronous people, even though of different positions, origins, and consciousness, it could not make them march in such different directions, especially so far backwards. They would not have such difficulty "understanding" the Communist language which is quite completely synchronous and precisely oriented to the most

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advanced economy. Synchronous people could not permit themselves to be so largely brutalized and romanticized, in spite of their mediate position, which keeps them economically stupid, in spite of all the semblance that it has a place there.'¹⁰⁸

    Or is the root of Nazism exactly the opposite, the successful progress of the modern world? In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno emphasized that self-denial and renunciation were inherent in the Western programme of the domination of nature, a project not limited to bourgeois society but whose literary record was at least as old as the Odyssey. Fascism, and indeed antisemitism, are seen as one pole of the dialectic of Western civilization itself. As domination progressed, so did the mad revolt of brutalized nature, culminating In the antisemitism of twentieth-century totalitarianism – rooted precisely in its most 'synchronous' people.

    Its result was not liberation but barbarism: 'the rebellion of suppressed nature against domination, directly useful to domination.'¹⁰⁹ The Frankfurt thinkers saw this barbarism as dialectically linked to the progress of civilization. This is what Herbert Marcuse meant by saying that totalitarian violence 'came from the structure of existing society'.¹¹⁰ For Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer, intensified domination and renunciation make such explosions inevitable. Did Auschwitz express the barbarity chosen by those unwilling or unable to join the modern world, as I have suggested with Bloch, or is its secret the explosion of the repressed side of our long journey away from barbarism and towards civilization? In fact, Auschwitz surely reflects both: a consummately civilized barbarism. If they broke through barriers to behaviour long equated with being civilized itself, the Nazis did so under the full weight of domination and renunciation, possible only in advanced civilization, using the technical and organizational sophistication available only in that civilization. The 'return' to the most brutally primitive levels of behaviour was a product of the present using the tools of the present.

    In other words, we must turn to modernity itself, as well as the lower middle class rebellion against it, to explain the Holocaust. Or rather, not to 'modernity' as such, but to the fact that after the workers' defeat in 1918 no alternative remained to its most oppressive forms. Defeat was the universal formative experience in Germany. Demoralized, without a way forward, many workers felt such defeat no less than the lower middle class. The ideological and

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political amalgam they accepted was rooted in a despair which they could see as their own, containing much truth about the destructive side of the modern world. Truth, that is, perceived from the sad position of being unable to create a more humane modern world. If workers moved towards Nazism it was because defeat had made them responsive to the rage of the lower middle class.

    Rather then confusing our class analysis, this fact completes it. As during any social crisis, as with any movement, the dominant party was not wholly of a single class. Others joined it for their own reasons, lending their own weight to the movement while accepting its central thrust. In this tragic situation, the impotent rage of the 'little man' without a way forward became generalized beyond the class in which it originated and to whose situation it gave focus. In the years of crisis after the war, more and more Germans became despairing, turned therefore into 'little men', and found their way to the Nazi revolt. Their mixture of fantasy and reality, of impotence and power, of regression and modernity pointed towards total war and extermination of the Jews as its natural outcome.