THE LOGIC OF THE HOLOCAUST:
Why the Nazis Killed the Jews
By Richard Koenigsberg
Online Publication Date: 21-Sep-2004.
In this paper I will attempt to delineate the mindset of Hitler and the Nazis, to reveal the logic that was the source of the Holocaust. We begin by conceptualizing the Final Solution as a collective project that was consciously undertaken and profoundly significant to many persons. To understand the Holocaust is to reveal the meaning of the project that Hitler conceived and put into action. The question of motivation grows out of the issue of meaning. To understand why the Nazis killed the Jews is to reveal the purpose of mass murder. What did Hitler believe he would accomplish through the extermination of the Jews? What did he and the Nazis aspire to achieve through the Final Solution?
Based on thirty-five years of research, I conclude that the Final Solution grew out of a coherent structure of thought. In my study of Hitler's Ideology, I analyzed the central metaphors in Hitler's writings and speeches. My objective was to ascertain the deep structure of Nazi ideology. Put another way, I sought to uncover the fantasy that was the source of Hitler's perception of reality. Hitler's ideology represented a cognitive model that structured historical action.
At the core of Hitler's ideology lay his conception of the German nation as a gigantic organism or actual body politic. This precious organism was imagined to be under attack, its life threatened by the presence of the Jew whose continued presence within the nation would lead to the death of Germany. Hitler described the Jew typically as the "demon of the disintegration of peoples, symbol of the unceasing destruction of their lives." In order to rescue Germany and save the life of the body politic, it was necessary to eliminate from within the nation those forces that threatened to destroy it. Genocide grew out of Hitler's conviction that in order to save the life of Germany it was necessary to exterminate the Jewish people.
Hitler believed that his project was of the utmost value, indeed the most significant mission that a human being could undertake. He stated that he wished to "prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the Cross." In order to achieve his objective-to save Germany from death-everything was permissible:
We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have once more opened the way for morality.
To rescue Germany would be to achieve "the greatest deed in the world." Hitler's struggle (Kampf) was the struggle against death: to maintain the life of Germany in the face of forces that he believed were acting to destroy her.
Hitler often stated that the purpose of National Socialism was to "maintain the life of Germany." He conceived of this mission in biological terms. Germany was described as a living organism with the German people constituting the cells of this organism. Jews constituted cells (bacteria or viruses) whose continued presence within the national body would lead to disease and death. In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that Germans would choose as their leader one who "profoundly recognizes the distress of his people" and who, after he has attained "the ultimate clarity" with regard to the nature of the disease, "seriously tries to cure it." Hitler believed he was that unique politician who possessed the insight to diagnose Germany's disease and the determination to prescribe and carry out the necessary treatment.
Hitler posed the question, "Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?" In his diary on March 27, 1942, Goebbels described the process of extermination as "pretty barbaric and not to be described in detail" but denied that it was necessary to have compunctions because after all this was a "life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus." In his 1935-6 propaganda booklet Himmler observed that the battle against peoples conducted by Jews had belonged "so far as we can look back, to the natural course of life on our planet." Therefore one could "calmly reach the conviction" that the struggle of nations against Jews, of "life and death" was quite as much a law of nature as "man's struggle against some epidemic, as the struggle of a healthy body to eliminate plague bacillus."
What was the meaning of this biological imagery employed by Nazi leaders? What did Hitler have in mind when he stated that Germany was subject to the same laws as "all other human organisms?" What was the "law of nature," as Himmler put it that made the struggle of nations against Jews equivalent to the struggle of a healthy body against the "plague bacillus?" The law to which Hitler and Himmler were referring, I believe, was the law of the immune system, that mechanism operating biochemically within each organism that works to destroy each and every cell identified as "not self."
Jews in the mind of Hitler and other Nazi leaders represented a foreign microorganism within the bloodstream of Germany. Since Jews were virulent microorganisms within the body politic, it was necessary that every single one of them be destroyed, lest they begin again to divide and multiply. The SS men functioned as "killer cells" within the national organism, assigned the task of identifying, tracking down and destroying the dangerous microorganisms. On the evening of February 22, 1942, Hitler met with Himmler and a Danish SS major and expounded his conviction that
The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.
Hitler conceived of the Final Solution from the perspective of immunology. As "Doctor of the German people," he would act to save the life of the body politic by destroying the pathogens that were the source of Germany's disease.
Nazism, then, revolved around the idea that Germany was an actual body whose life was endangered by the presence of foreign cells within its bloodstream. The Final Solution represented a systematic effort to remove these alien cells from within the body politic, thereby destroying the source of the nation's disease and saving its life. This was the central fantasy contained within Hitler's ideology: That Germany was an actual organism containing Jewish bacteria and viruses whose removal was necessary if the nation was to survive. However, what is the meaning of this extraordinary idea? Nations are not bodies and Jews are not bacteria. Why did these metaphors resonate with the German people? Let us approach this question by viewing Nazism as a religion.
Das Deutsche Volk, das Deutsche Volk, das Deutsche Volk were words echoing throughout Germany in the early Thirties. Hitler's religion of Nazism permitted the German people to worship themselves, bow down to their own nation and nationality. In the United States we say, "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God." The oath of the SS Man went as follows: "We swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich, our loyalty and bravery. We swear to you, and our superiors appointed to you, obedience unto death. So help us God!" Nazism was pledge of allegiance in its most radical form, apogee of Western nationalism.
It is misleading to conceptualize the willingness of Nazis to follow orders in terms of passive acquiescence. What we call obedience was understood and experienced by Germans as faithfulness, loyalty, and willingness to sacrifice for the community. This quality of active devotion lay at the heart of the Nazi revolution. When 15,000 persons rise to their feet and pay respect to basketball player Michael Jordan with a standing ovation, we don't call this "obedience." Rather, we understand the applause to mean that persons appreciate what Jordan has accomplished and stands for. So it was with the German people in their relation to Hitler. Many Germans loved Hitler and appreciated what he said.
Hitler himself was the greatest devotee of his own religion. He declared, "We do not want to have any other God-only Germany." He inspired others to worship the god that he worshipped, indeed insisted that they do so. Though cynical and devious in his pursuit of power, his devotion to Germany was sincere and profound. Typically, he proclaimed:
Our future is Germany. Our today is German. 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 whole existence.
He affirmed that "Our love towards our people will never falter, and our faith in this Germany of ours is imperishable" and stated that Deutscheland uber Alles is a "profession of faith, which today fills millions with a greater strength, with that faith which is mightier than any earthly might." Nationalism, for Hitler, meant to act with a "boundless, all embracing love for the Volk and, if necessary, to die for it."
Hitler stated that Volksgemeinschaft meant "overcoming bourgeois privatism, unconditionally equating the individual fate and the fate of the nation." Every single German was obligated to unite with the community, to embrace and share the common faith. According to Hitler:
No one is excepted from the crisis of the Reich. This Volk is but yourselves. There may not be a single person who excludes himself from this obligation.
Hitler's nationalism insisted upon absolute identification with the community. Nazi totalitarianism meant that not a single person was exempt from the obligation to devote one's life to Germany and make enormous sacrifices in her name.
Hitler said, "We are fanatic in our love for our people. We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but we will pursue with fanatic hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours." Hitler's rage was directed toward those whom he imagined did not share his faith. The existence of such persons seemed to mock his belief and sincerity. Hitler stated that:
Our aim is the dictatorship of the whole people, the community. I began to win men to the idea of an eternal national and social ideal-to subordinate one's own interests to the interest of the whole society. There are, nevertheless, a few incurables who had never understood the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.
By calling persons who refused to subordinate personal interests to the interest of society "incurables," Hitler was suggesting that those who did not wish to belong to the community were suffering from a disease. This idea lay at the heart of Nazi ideology: that anyone who did not believe in Hitler and his movement, did not wish to devote his or her life to the nation, was "sick." The "disease within the body of the people" to which Hitler so often referred symbolized, we may suggest, precisely the wish to separate from the national community. It was this desire to be separate that the Nazis aspired to eradicate.
If Nazism was rooted in profound attachment to Germany, Jews symbolized negation of attachment and destruction of the idea of the nation. The metaphor that appeared with greatest frequency in Hitler's speeches as a description of Jews was Zerzetzung or "force of disintegration." This German word is widely used in chemistry and biology meaning "decomposition," "decay," or "putrefaction." The word was intended to suggest that the Jewish race worked toward the destruction or decomposition of all "genuine values," of everything that was sacred to the Germans—Germanic tradition, culture, their position in the world, patriotism, and patriotic symbols. Goebbels stated in January 1945 that "The Jews are the incarnation of that destructive drive which in these terrible years rages in the enemies' warfare against everything that we consider noble, beautiful and worth preserving."
Jews symbolized for the Nazis that which called into question the fundamental beliefs and values of the German people. Where the Aryan stood for willingness to sacrifice for the community, Jews stood for individualism. If the good German was characterized by idealistic devotion to a cause, Jews represented selfishness, self-interest, practicality, and money. Goebbels contrasted "The creative, constructive philosophy of National Socialism with its idealistic goals" to the Jewish philosophy of "materialism and individualism." Jews were seen as lacking a soul—the precise opposite of the heroic, self-sacrificing Aryan.
Hitler bluntly told his audiences, "You are nothing, your nation is everything." The fundamental premise of Nazi ideology was that the individual should subordinate himself to the community. The essence of morality, according to this view, was willingness to sacrifice personal interest in the name of the nation. Hitler's Official Programme, published in 1927, put forth as its central plank: "The Common Interest before Self Interest." It stated that "The leaders of our public life all worship the same god-Individualism. Personal interest is the sole incentive." National Socialism would come into being in order to subordinate the interests of the individual to the requirements of the collective.
On the one hand, then, stood the ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people; on the other hand stood the ideas of individualism and individuality. Hitler believed that the tendency of the individual to pursue private interest worked to shatter the bond tying him to his nation. The fundamental characteristic of Jews according to the Nazis was precisely their "free floating" quality, the fact that they lacked an organic tie to a national body. Their tendency to ruthlessly pursue personal interest (both cause and effect of their separateness) tempted others to embrace this tendency. The very existence of Jews within a nation worked to disintegrate the body politic.
The following judgment by the Cologne Labor Court dated January 21, 1941, denied the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation:
The precondition for the claim to a vacation-membership of the plant community-does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency which is geared to forwarding his personal interests and securing economic advantages.
By virtue of the racially inherited Jewish tendency toward "forwarding personal interests and securing economic advantages," the Jew was imagined to be incapable of participating in the life of a community. Hitler called Jews the "ferment of decomposition in peoples," meaning that the Jew "destroys and must destroy." Therefore, Hitler said, it is "beside the point whether the individual Jew is 'decent' or not. In himself he carries those characteristics which Nature has given him."
Hitler stated that the Jew "completely lacks the conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community." Nazi scholarship declared that the peculiar characteristic of Judaism was "its hostility to human society," which is why there could be no solution to the Jewish question. A true understanding of Jews and Judaism "insists on their total annihilation." The Jewish tendency toward selfish individualism (fixed by heredity according to the Nazis) meant that they were incapable of comprehending the necessity of national self-sacrifice. The purpose of the Final Solution was to punish the Jews for their anti-social tendencies, to demonstrate that sacrifice was required of everyone, that it was impossible for any human being to escape or resist the embrace of the nation-state. The Final Solution was undertaken in order to prove that evasion of society was impossible.
Hitler's nationalism was bound to the idea of sacrifice. Writing about the First World War (in which two million German soldiers were killed), Hitler said: "When in the long war years Death snatched so many dear comrades and friends from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain-after all, were they not dying for Germany?" As the Second World War progressed with the invasion of Russia, Goebbels was satisfied to note that "The German soldiers go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service." General von Runstedt admonished the soldiers of World War II to emulate the example of their brothers in the First World War: "The heroic death of a German soldier is not something to be forgotten. Instead, it should inspire everyone who remembers it 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."
The ideology of Germany, then, was intimately bound to the idea of self-sacrifice on a national level. However, after the First World War questions began to arise regarding the value of the monumental sacrifices that had been made by German soldiers. A paradox arose in the minds of some thinkers: Why had the best of the German stock, soldiers in the prime of life, been sent indiscriminately to their deaths, while great pains were taken to keep other, "inferior" kinds of persons alive. In their influential book on "life unworthy of life" published in, 1918 Binding and Hoche wrote:
If one thinks of a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for their living patients-then one would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable possession of humanity on one side and on the other the greatest care of beings who are not only worthless but even manifest negative value.
In the battlefields of the First World War, the state squandered the lives of healthy, young men. In hospitals, on the other hand, the state devoted great efforts toward assuring the survival of those who were mentally ill. If the state was willing to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers, why should so many resources be expended to keep mental patients alive?
Based on the impact and according to the logic of ideas like these about "life unworthy life," the "euthanasia movement" was initiated by the Nazis. By 1939, prior to the Final Solution, nearly 100,000 defective children and mental patients had been killed by the German state. A major figure in the euthanasia movement, Dr. Pfanmuller, articulated the link between the death of soldiers in war and state killing of the mentally ill when he said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum." What was unbearable was that the idea that the state had no qualms about sending the most valuable human beings to die, but took great pains to preserve the lives of those that made no contribution to the community.
In order to "balance things out," therefore, achieve a kind of "fairness," the Nazis put forth and acted upon the idea that it was necessary to kill bad persons as well as good ones. If the state acted without compunction to cause the deaths of those who made the greatest contribution to the nation (German soldiers), surely it should have no misgivings about killing mentally ill or anti-social elements that made no contribution to the community. Indeed, according to Nazi ideology, the nation would be better off if it was relieved of the burden of these "parasites on the body of the people" that consumed resources but did not produce or create them.
Realization that the state worked to preserve the lives of inferior people while at the same time promiscuously sending soldiers to die was part of a broader question raised by Hitler and others subsequent to the First World War: Why does the state require that the best human beings die while it allows the worst to survive? The best human beings according to Hitler were those who willingly abandoned personal interests in the name of serving the community. The very best human beings did not shrink from making the "supreme sacrifice;" they were willing to be "obedient unto death," to die for their country. According to our ordinary sense of justice or fairness, moral virtue is rewarded, while the absence of morality is punished. In warfare, however, those who are morally virtuous are punished (with death); while those who are immoral (shirkers, war deserters, those unwilling to serve the country, etc.) are rewarded (they do not lose their lives).
Hitler understood what warfare and battle were, having participated in the First World War and witnessed the death and mutilation of hundreds of his comrades. He knew that starting a Second World War would lead to the deaths of innumerable German soldiers. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to declare war and to send his troops into battle. Was this not the prerogative of the commander-in-chief of a great nation?
If young German men, the best human beings, were obliged to go to war when their nation asked them to do so, to suffer and perhaps to die in battle, why should inferior people be spared such a fate? If Germans were required to sacrifice their individuality in the name of the community, surrender their bodies to the nation state, why should other human beings be exempt from this obligation? Questions such as these led to the Final Solution.
The extermination of the Jewish people began in 1941, prior to the development of death camps and gas chambers. As the German army penetrated into the Soviet Union, they were followed closely by the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units. It is estimated that more than one-and-one-half million Jews were killed, most of them shot at close range. By the end of the winter of 1941-42, more than 90% of the Jews trapped by the Germans east of the Soviet border had been killed. The extermination of men, women, and children apparently did not disturb Hitler. "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," he said, "Then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin." The logic of extermination seems to be contained within this statement. If he had the right as commander-in-chief of the army to send the best human beings, German soldiers, to their deaths, why, Hitler reflected, would he not have the right to send Jews, the worst human beings, mortal enemies of the German people to their deaths?
A sign at the entrance to Auschwitz read: "I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front to gain victory for the Third Reich, you will have to work here for the welfare of a new Europe." This sign, mocking or taunting the Jews as they arrived at the camps, evokes the mentality that generated the Holocaust. It would appear that the Final Solution functioned as a means of conveying to Jews the following message: "Do not think that you are exempt from the obligation to sacrifice for Germany. Just as our soldiers are suffering and dying for Germany at the front, so you too will be compelled to suffer and die in the camps." Jews-like the German soldiers-would be required to give over their bodies and to sacrifice their lives at the behest of the nation-state.
The Final Solution came into being in order to teach Jews a lesson, punish them for their "selfish individualism." Jews symbolized the idea that it was possible to evade or escape the nation-state, to function or exist under conditions of separateness from the community. The Final Solution represented an effort to demonstrate that there could be no such thing as separation from the national community. The Holocaust affirmed that the nation-state was "total," capable of controlling the lives and deaths of each and every human being within its boundaries. The Final Solution came into being in order to substantiate the omnipotence of Germany, show the Jews "once and for all" that they were not exempt from the obligation to submit to the community.
The logic of the Holocaust followed from the logic of domination and death that was the essence of National Socialism. Nazism glorified the nation-state and negated the individual, conferring absolute power upon the idea of the "community." In Nazism, the human being was expected to sacrifice his concrete existence for the good of the nation. Hitler explained to the German people their role, and summed up Nazi ideology as follows: "You are nothing, your nation is everything."
On the other hand according to Hitler there was one group of people, Jews, that was incapable of catching on, who refused to buy into the ideal of sacrificial submission. The idea that certain persons believed that they were exempt from the obligation to submit to the community-enraged Hitler and was the source of what followed. Why were some people required to give over their lives, to sacrifice themselves for Germany while others were not? Hitler projected the idea of freedom from the community onto the Jews.
However, the Nazis could not bear to contemplate freedom, the idea that some people were not required to surrender their lives to the state. After all, they had sworn "obedience unto death" to Hitler and Germany. The Final Solution was undertaken in order to demonstrate that freedom was not an option, that it was impossible to evade the nation-state. The Holocaust came into being in order to demonstrate to the Jews that Germany was omnipotent. No one was capable of resisting; everyone would be compelled to submit. If German soldiers were suffering and dying in massive numbers in battle, so Jews would be required to suffer and die in massive numbers in death camps.
The Holocaust represented the consummation of Nazism, the climax of Western nationalism, and fulfillment of the fantasy that it is "good and beautiful to die for one's country." By acting out this fantasy of nationalism, taking it to its extreme, bizarre conclusion, Hitler was telling us something about, pointing toward the rottenness or corruptness of this fantasy. In war, soldiers are required to give over their bodies and souls to the nation-state, to die when leaders ask them to do so. The Holocaust constituted an extension of this logic. Jews were compelled to give over their bodies and souls to Germany. The Holocaust depicts the idea of "dying for the country" stripped of words such as honor, loyalty and glorify.