DYING FOR ONE'S COUNTRY:
The Logic of War & Genocide
By Richard Koenigsberg
Online Publication Date: 21-Sep-2004.
My research on Hitler focuses not on the idiosyncrasies of his personality, but rather on the relationship between his ideology and the events that his ideas generated. In few instances have such momentous historical occurrences been so closely connected to the thought processes of a single man. What logic led Hitler to believe that it was necessary to destroy the Jewish race?
A great deal of research has been done on perpetrators: the motives and circumstances that lead followers to carry out acts of violence. Less attention has been devoted to why leaders feel it is necessary to initiate acts of political violence in the first place. This question rarely is systematically posed because there is a tendency to take the phenomenon of warfare for granted. Insofar as human beings have engaged in armed political conflict throughout recorded history, war often is thought of as an immutable cultural institution, even a natural occurrence.
In my view the existence and persistence of warfare as a social institution should be interrogated rather than assumed or taken for granted. One may conceptualize war as an idea or form of activity created by human beings in response to certain fears, desires and fantasies. The motives become crystallized and articulated as ideologies that provide rationales for waging war. We transform war into a problematic by posing the question why. Why has war been a recurring element in human social life and history? Why have people embraced war in spite of the fact that its consequences invariably are destruction and death?
We often think of war as if originating in a place outside of the subject, separate from the human agent. War feels as if it is coming from outside the human domain, emanating from a distance as a force that cannot be resisted. By focusing on the question of why, we highlight the role of agency and human motivation in generating warfare. Who declares war and organizes battles other than human beings?
Hitler was a human being, even if we prefer to think that he was not. We would like to separate Hitler from the human race by pretending he was exceptional, or an anomaly. We want to rescue our self-esteem, that is, that part of our self-esteem deriving from identification with our civilization and belief in the goodness or beneficence of societies. We prefer to draw a contrast between violence and killing, on the one hand, and civilization on the other, as if these were separate and distinct phenomena.
However what if the kind of massive brutality and destruction witnessed in the Holocaust and in Hitler's war against the Soviet Union were not separate from the ideals of society, but rather intimately bound to them? Hitler said, "We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany, we have performed the greatest deed in the world." Hitler's ideology and the violence that grew out of it revolved around his desire to save Germany by wiping out an enemy whose continued presence, he believed, would result in the destruction of his nation and Western civilization. Though political violence may look like mindless aggression, it usually is undertaken on the basis of a coherent theory or body of thought. Those who undertake to kill and die do so under the assumption that their actions are "necessary" in order to defend or rescue a sacred ideal.
War grows out of military institutions that are accepted and respected as significant elements of the social order. People may deliberate or debate about whether particular wars are good or bad, right or wrong, necessary or unnecessary, etc., but most people see the military as a necessary if perhaps unfortunate institution of society. In the darkness of a movie theater, however, witnessing the chaos, mayhem and absurdity of battle, we may say to ourselves "War is insane."
But rarely do news reports or history books write about or conceptualize war as pathology. Societies enthusiastically create categories of individual psychopathology—we now even have a "social anxiety disorder." However, we are less enthusiastic about labeling collective forms of behavior as pathological. Indeed, in spite of its massive destructiveness, the tens-of-millions of deaths that war caused in the Twentieth Century, virtually no one has systematically pursued the idea that war and the wish to wage it constitutes a form of mental disorder. To declare that the institution of warfare embodies mental disorder is to suggest that psychopathology is contained within the fabric of civilization and generated by the norms of society.
Genocide like warfare is a collective or societal rather than individual form of violence. Unlike war, however, genocidal behavior usually is viewed as transgressing society's norms—an aberration. If Hitler simply had waged war and not been responsible for the Holocaust, we might view him today as a failed military leader rather than as a monster. Hitler might be treated like Napoleon, someone who caused many people to die in his attempt to conquer the world. Nine-million men were killed and over twenty-two million wounded in the First World War. The Generals who directed that war and were responsible for the deaths of millions—men such as Douglas Haig—are sometimes called stupid because of their failed military strategies. Yet rarely are they accused of being mass-murders, or called evil.
I wish to hypothesize and attempt to demonstrate in this paper that war and genocide are not separate phenomena. Certainly genocide and war were not separate in Hitler's mind. Indeed, Hitler conceived and carried out the Final Solution guided by the belief that there was an intimate connection between the death of German soldiers in war and the murder of Jews.
Is there anything that can be learned from the monumental destruction that Hitler and the Nazis brought about? I believe that there was a hidden message contained within Hitler's ideas and actions, something he was struggling to convey. Hitler barely grasped this message himself, but enacted it through the vehicle of the Final Solution. This paper seeks to reveal what Hitler had in mind when he decided that it was necessary to exterminate the Jewish race.
People tend to assume that war has a rational purpose; that it revolves around conquest, territorial expansion, defense of one's nation's boundaries, the pursuit of national interests, etc. For example, a standard historical account of the Second World War states that Hitler dreamt of "building a vast German Empire sprawling across Central and Eastern Europe," that his aim was to "wage a war of conquest against the Soviet Union " and to make Germany the "most powerful state in all of Europe."
Based on research undertaken over the past thirty-five years, I have discovered deeper narratives operating "beneath the radar" of political history. In order to perceive these hidden narratives, it is necessary to focus upon and listen intently to the words and images put forth by people that generate action on the stage of history. Do we really understand why Hitler undertook the Final Solution, or why he started a war that resulted in the deaths of tens-of-millions of people and the devastation of his own nation? Instead of assuming that we know the reasons these things occurred—why not pay close attention to what Hitler actually said in order to discern what he may have had in mind.
Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939. Speaking before the Reichstag as German planes and troops crossed the Polish borders in a devastating Blitzkrieg, he said:
As a National Socialist and a German soldier, I enter upon this fight with a stout heart! My whole life has been but one continuous struggle for my people, and that whole struggle has been inspired by one single conviction: Faith in my people! I ask of every German what I myself am prepared to do at any moment: to be ready to lay down his life for his people and for his country. If anyone thinks that he can evade this national duty directly or indirectly, he will perish.
In this passage, Hitler articulates his thinking about the war that is just about to begin, and provides a preview of what is going to occur. He asks every German to do what he was prepared to do (and eventually did): To lay down his life for his country. If anyone tried to evade the duty to lay down one's life, Hitler insisted, that person would "perish." Hitler seemed to be suggesting that in the next war either one would fight and die for Germany, or that one would be killed. Either die for your country, or your country will kill you.
Nazism was a form of radical nationalism asserting absolute identity between self and nation. Hitler's ideology of Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the German people, required "overcoming bourgeois privatism" in order to "unconditionally equate the individual fate with the fate of the nation." The Volk, according to Hitler, encompassed and embraced each and every German. "No one is excepted from the crisis of the Reich," Hitler said. "There may not be a single person who excludes himself from this joint obligation." Nazism insisted that everyone was obligated to partake of the life of the community. "This Volk," Hitler declared, "is but yourselves."
Nazism revolved around worship of the German nation. Hitler said: "We do not want to have any other God, only Germany." Hitler was a fanatic preacher obsessed with his god, Germany. He implored and exhorted the German people to devote their lives to the god to which he had devoted his own life:
Our future is Germany. Our today is Germany. And our past is Germany. Let us take a vow this morning, at every hour, in each day, to think of Germany, of the nation, of our German people. You cannot be unfaithful to something that has given sense and meaning to your life.
Nazism represented negation of individuality in the name of the community. "You are nothing, your nation is everything," Hitler proclaimed. The moral person willingly abandoned his own desires in the name of the collective. According to Nazi ideology, one could not choose to devote one's life to one's nation or choose not to do so. Rather, renunciation of individual interests in the name of the community was a sacred obligation from which no one was exempt.
The ultimate act of self-renunciation was willingness to die for Germany. Reflecting on the loyalty and devotion of his comrades, Hitler observed that "More than once, thousands and thousands of young Germans have stepped forward with self-sacrificing resolve to sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland." Hitler glorified the idea of "dying for one's country," building his ideology on the foundation of this commonplace idea and carrying it to an extreme, bizarre conclusion.
We think of National Socialism as the quintessence of brutality and immorality. The Nazis did not see it this way. Goebbels stated that to be a National Socialist meant to "subordinate the I to the Thou, sacrifice the personality for the whole." He defined Nazism as "service, renunciation for individuals and a claim for the whole, fanatic of love, courage to sacrifice, resignation for the Volk." A U.S. Department of State booklet explicated Nazi ideology as a conviction that "consecrates its whole life to the service of an idea, a faith, a task or duty even when it knows that the destruction of its own life is certain."
Goebbels contrasted the creative, constructive philosophy of National Socialism with its idealistic goals to the Jewish philosophy of "materialism and individualism." Hitler's Official Programme published in 1927 inveighed against the leaders of public life who all worshipped the same god, "individualism," and whose sole incentive was "personal interest." The essence of the Nazi complaint was that the Jew lacked the capacity to sacrifice himself in the name of the community.
The popular concept is that the Nazis were intent upon producing a race of "supermen." Hitler did believe in the "superiority" of the Aryan race, but his idea of what constituted Aryan superiority is quite different than what is commonly assumed. Further, what made Aryans superior did not necessarily guarantee victory in war. On the contrary, Hitler feared, the Aryan trait that made them superior as culture-builders might lead to the downfall and extinction of the race rather than to its triumph and survival.
According to Hitler's theory propounded in Mein Kampf, what was unique about the Aryan was his willingness to abandon self-interest and transcend egoism in the name of surrendering to the community. What was "most strongly developed in the Aryan," Hitler said, was the "self-sacrificing will to give one's personal labor and if necessary one's own life for others." The Aryan was "not greatest in his mental abilities as such," but rather in the "extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community." The Aryan according to Hitler willingly "subordinates his own ego to the life of the community" and "if the hour demands it" even sacrifices himself.
The Jew by contrast, Hitler said, represented the "mightiest counterpart to the Aryan." Whereas the Aryan willingly sacrificed himself for the community, in the Jewish people the "will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual's naked instinct of self-preservation." The Jew lacked completely, Hitler believed, the "most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude." The Jew's "absolute absence of all sense of sacrifice" expressed itself as "cowardice."
Hitler was one of the sixty-five million men who fought in the First World War; an instance of mass-slaughter in which nine-million men were killed and nearly thirty million wounded or reported missing. During the period of 1914-1918 across Europe and the wider world men were killed at an average rate of more than six thousand per day. Hitler was among those who suffered in the trenches, endured the wet and the cold and the scarcity of food, the rats and bedbugs, and the endless artillery barrage. He witnessed the death and dismemberment of hundreds of his comrades and experienced the stench of their decaying bodies.
It is miraculous that Hitler himself was not killed. According to Walter S. Frank's study of Hitler and the First World War, the chance that a 1914 volunteer in Hitler's regiment would be killed or maimed was almost guaranteed. Because of replacements, Hitler's regiment, which consisted of 3600 men in 1914, suffered 3754 killed before the war ended. Hitler told an English reporter that on one occasion while eating, he moved from one spot in a trench to another twenty yards away. Only a few seconds later, an artillery shell exploded on the very spot from which he had moved, killing every one of his comrades. Hitler was temporarily blinded by poison gas and lying in a hospital bed when the war ended in 1918.
One might expect that Hitler's trench experiences would have humanized, sensitized him to the suffering and destruction wrought by war. One would think that he would have become highly critical of the leaders of his nation's war effort such as von Hindenburg and Ludendorff whose military strategies led to the deaths of two million German soldiers. Yet astonishingly Hitler rarely complained or expressed regrets about what he had gone through. Nor did he cease to admire and support Germany 's military leaders.
Why can't human beings abandon war, which is the source of profound suffering, degradation and death? Why did Hitler's experiences not lead him to critique the institution of warfare? The problem is that the idea of war is bound to the ideology of nationalism. People can be persuaded to fight and die because they are deeply attached and feel obligated to their own nations. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "When in the long war years Death snatched so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain. After all, were they not dying for Germany?"
Hitler asserted that "Any man who loves his people proves it solely by the sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it." He stated that National Socialism meant acting with a "boundless and all embracing love for the people, and if necessary to die for it." He proclaimed that giving one's life for the community constituted the "crown of all sacrifice." The apogee of love and devotion within the framework of Hitler's radical nationalism was the willingness to die for one's country. Nazism was an ideology of martyrdom revolving around "laying down one's life for one's people and country."
Hitler glorified war and the death of the German soldier in battle. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that in 1914 his young volunteer regiment had received its baptism of fire. With "Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips," Hitler said, "Our young regiment had gone into the battle as to a dance. The most precious blood there sacrificed itself joyfully, in the faith that it was preserving the independence and freedom of the fatherland." In July 1917, Hitler reports, his regiment set foot for the second time on the "ground that was sacred to all of us." The ground was sacred because in it the "best comrades slumbered still almost children, who had run to their death with gleaming eyes for the one true fatherland." Hitler and his fellow soldiers "stood in respectful emotion at this shrine of 'loyalty and obedience to the death’."
This is not to say that questions and doubts had not arisen in the mind of Hitler and many other Germans subsequent to their nation’s defeat in the First World War. In Mein Kampf, Hitler conveyed his thoughts upon learning that Germany had surrendered and signed the armistice:
And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of the two millions who died. Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made to the fatherland when with sore heart she let her best-loved boys march off, never to see them again?
What had been the purpose of the war? Why had two million German soldiers been killed and four million wounded? What had been the meaning of the monumental sacrifices? These questions cried out for an answer.
Hitler responded to the question of the meaning of German sacrifices by deflecting it with another one. The question, "Why had Germans soldiers died?" transmogrified into the question, "Why had German soldiers died while other Germans had not died." Hitler observed that for each "Hero who had made the supreme sacrifice" there was a "shirker who cunningly dodged death." Hitler became obsessed with the idea that while so many men had died, others had avoided fighting altogether. Contemplating the idea that many had sacrificed their lives while others had not, Hitler became deeply disturbed and enraged.
We have observed that Hitler judged the worth of a human being on the basis of his capacity for sacrifice. He stated that during the First World War "one extreme of the population, which was constituted of the best elements, had given a typical example of its heroism and had sacrificed itself almost to a man;" whereas "the other extreme, which was constituted of the worst elements of the population, had preserved itself almost intact." While for four and a half years our "best human material was being thinned to an exceptional degree on the battlefields," the worst material "wonderfully succeeded in saving themselves."
Thus a conundrum arose that would preoccupy Hitler throughout his life: Why in war do the best human beings die while the worst survive? Our ordinary expectation is that if we perform in accordance with morality or virtue, we will be rewarded; whereas if we act immorally, we will be punished. Yet Hitler discovered that what occurs in war acts in opposition to what we feel should occur. In war, those who adhere to societal norms by enthusiastically performing their duty are killed. While those who behave immorally by evading their responsibility to society survive. Hitler was alarmed and agitated by the profound unfairness or injustice of this state of affairs.
Upon returning home after having been discharged from a military hospital as cured, Hitler alleged that the "offices were filled with Jews." He claimed that "nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk." Hitler was amazed at this "plethora of warriors of the chosen people and could not help compare them with their rare representatives at the front." Thus the question of why some had died in the war and others had not, why the best had been killed while the worst survived, mutated into: "Why while German soldiers were dying at the front were Jews safe, comfortable and secure at home?"
Hitler believed that during the time German soldiers were fighting the war, Jews at home who avoided joining the army had fomented revolution and taken over the government. Hitler became filled with fantasies of revenge. He put forth an enigmatic idea linking the death of German soldiers at the front with the murder of Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said, "If the best men were dying at the front, the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin."
He declared that "if at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundred of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain." It would appear that Hitler attempted to come to terms with the meaning of the First World War by suggesting that the death of millions of Germans soldiers would become bearable if only Jews too were compelled to die.
Hitler’s vision of war and genocide constituted an ideology of death insisting that no one should be exempt from the obligation to sacrifice one’s life for the national community. Further, it would appear that the Holocaust grew directly out of Hitler’s experience of the First World War. Hitler and his comrades had been subjected to poison gas in the trenches during the First World War. In the spirit of do unto others as has been done unto you, Hitler would subject Jews to poison gas in the death camps.
The Holocaust expressed Hitler’s idea that no one should be allowed to escape or evade the obligation to sacrifice one’s life for Germany. Hitler believed that the best human beings had been killed in the First World War while the worst had survived. In the Second World War the worst human beings would not be spared. Just as German soldiers were required to give over their bodies and lives to the nation-state, so Jews would be required to do so.
As the attack against Russia began, German General von Rundstedt admonished the soldier of the Second World War to emulate the examples of his brothers in the First World War and "to die in the same way, to be as strong, unswerving and obedient, to go happily and as a matter of course to his death." As war on the Eastern Front progressed, Goebbels was satisfied to note that "The German soldiers go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service." German soldiers did not rebel against the duty to fight and die. They went like sheep to the slaughter.
Hitler joined the army in 1914 at the behest of his nation and its leaders. In 1939 twenty-five years later, he was Germany’s leader. Now it was his turn to declare war and to ask young men to enter the battlefield. Hitler’s familiarity with war did not deter him. He knew that Germany’s soldiers would die and be maimed. However, now that he was Germany’s leader and commander-in-chief, why should he waver? Had the German leadership hesitated to declare war in 1914 and to send his comrades and him to die at the front? Was a soldier not obligated to do his duty, to fight when asked by his nation to do so and if necessary to make the 'supreme sacrifice’?
The Final Solution or systematic extermination of the Jewish people began before the construction of death camps and gas chambers. As the German army moved eastward into the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units. Millions of Jews were shot and killed, many of them buried in gorges that bear a striking resemblance to the trenches of the First World War. Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women, and children, providing the following rationale: "If I don't mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin."
Here we approach the crux of the matter and the meaning of the Holocaust. Hitler appears to be saying that if he had no compunctions about sending German soldiers to die in battle, then why should he have any compunctions about sending Jews—mortal enemies of the German people—to their deaths? The logic of genocide derived from the logic of war. Hitler declared that if German soldiers had to die, so must Jews. No one could be exempt. Everyone would be required to sacrifice their lives for Germany.
What disturbed Hitler about the First World War was his belief that some had died whereas others had not; that the best had been killed whereas the worst had survived. Hitler was enraged when he contemplated the idea that many Germans had sacrificed their lives, while others—shirkers, war deserters, and Jews—had avoided fighting entirely. In this second war, Hitler insisted, things would be different. This time, everyone would participate equally. Even Jews would lay down their lives.
Ronald Hayman in his biographical study of Hitler reports an encounter between Hitler and his friend Henny von Schirach. She had returned to Germany in April 1943 after she had visited friends in occupied Amsterdam and became aware that helpless women were being taken away and transported to camps. After dinner at Obersalzberg, Hitler turned to his friend and said "You've come from Holland?" She replied, "Yes, that's why I'm here, I wanted to talk to you. I've seen frightful things. I can't believe that's what you want."
"You're sentimental, Frau von Schirach," Hitler replied. Then he jumped to his feet and formed with his hands two bowls which he moved up and down like scales as he said loudly and insistently:
Look—every day ten thousand of my most valuable men are killed, men who are irreplaceable, the best. The balance is wrong; the equilibrium in Europe has been upset. Because the others aren't being killed. They survive, the ones in camps, the inferior ones. So what's it going to look like in Europe in a hundred years? In a thousand?
Hitler undertook the extermination of the Jews, this passage suggests, in order to balance the scale of death. As the best human beings—German soldiers—were dying in vast numbers on the field of battle, so it would be necessary to make certain that the worst human beings—Jews—died as well.
Members of the Aryan race, loyal and obedient, would willingly sacrifice their lives. The German soldier, as General von Runstedt put it, would go "happily and as a matter of course to his death." He would be prepared at any moment as Hitler stated in his declaration of war to "lay down his life for his people and his country." Jews on the other hand, according to Hitler, were a race that was incapable or unwilling to sacrifice for the community. In the case of the Jew, therefore, it was necessary that he be compelled to die.
The Second World War and the Holocaust were two sides of the same coin. War provided for Hitler the occasion to sacrifice his own people. Once again the German soldier would demonstrate his "loyalty and obedience unto death." The Holocaust represented another form or manifestation of "dying for the country." The norms of war define soldiers—one's own and the enemy's—as the class of people that are responsible for dying. Genocide constituted an extension of the logic of war, enlarging the pool of sacrificial victims.
Historians speak of Hitler's extermination of the Jews as the Holocaust. The word derives from the word olah in the Hebrew Bible. It had the religious meaning of a burnt-sacrifice. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament the word became holokauston. The English definition made it "an offering wholly consumed by fire." What Hitler did added another meaning to the dictionary definition: "A complete or thorough sacrifice or destruction, especially by fire, as of large number of human beings."
Use of the term Holocaust to describe what occurred suggests that we do understand that the extermination of the Jews constituted a sacrifice. However, we have hesitated to articulate the precise meaning of this sacrifice, perhaps because even now we do not wish to acknowledge that with regard to the fate of the Jews, Hitler accomplished what he set out to achieve. In the Holocaust, Hitler sacrificed the Jewish people to the god that he worshipped, Germany.
In the First World War, German soldiers had sacrificed themselves in massive numbers. Hitler felt that Jews had acted deviously in order to avoid fighting and dying. In the Second World War, German soldiers again would be expected to "lay down their lives for their people and country" (as Hitler put it in his Declaration of War). In this war, however, unlike the first one, Hitler insisted that Jews would not be allowed to be "shirkers". Hitler stated in his Declaration of War that if anyone thought that he could "evade the national duty" (to lay down one's life for the country), that person would "perish." The Final Solution was undertaken to make certain that Jews—like German soldiers—would give their bodies over to the nation-state and die when asked to do so.
The Holocaust reveals the abject and degrading fate of a body that has been given over to, taken over by the state. A soldier is required to enter into battle at the behest of his nation. Often, he dies a brutal, ugly and horrific death. However, in spite of the brutality and ugliness of his death, the soldier's sacrifice—dying for his country--frequently has been viewed as noble and beautiful. It is impossible, on the other hand, to view the death of a Jew in the gas chamber as noble and beautiful. The Holocaust depicts the ugliness, futility and meaninglessness of submission to the nation state, sacrificial death stripped of words such as honor, heroism and glory.