Cristina Sánchez de Lara*,
Madrid, 25/04/2022
To introduce the topic, it must be explained the period in which the genocide took place due to the empowerment of Hitler and the Nazi party, but there must also be a deep explanation about the antecedents of the mass murder that the Jews suffered. Approximately five to six million Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1945. The debate of the Holocaust was how a supposedly civilized and one of the most developed Western countries could allow this to happen.
Discrimination to the Jews was, until the end of the XIX century, based on the stigmatization of the West social hierarchy, as Christians had always considered Jews as “traitors” because of the rejection of Jesus and his murder. In this context, both Catholic and Protestant churches saw Jews as bloodhounds and troublesome.
Traditional antisemitism came into a new phase when the nation-state appeared. Jews were seen as enemies of modernity (Jones, 2006), as they were a threat – due to their oppressive economy – and were isolated in the ghettos, so they could never be a positive part of the nation-state. However, it is curious that Germany was one of the most tolerant states with Jews, and even allowed them to get the citizenship in Prussia. This could seem contradictory, but it is true that, although German people were so much progressive, German parties and politicians were still close.
The result of the defeat in the First World War carried the sprung of a feeling of shame within the whole country, which finally resulted in political extremism. When the NSDAP came into power, social death was imposed to Jews. Hitler and his Nazi party counted with wide popular support, and people were even proud that Hitler had came to expulse “outsiders” from their country. This means that Jews were not the only objective in the first years of Hitler’s mandate, but also the regime was compromised with the expulsion of Communists, handicapped, homosexuals, vagrants…
This is something relevant to be considered, as there is evidence of that this hate for Jews was not, at first, anything that differed from the discrimination to other minority groups. The conception of a deeper background that hides behind the genocide of Jews follows softer definitions of what genocide is, according to the historian Jones. This “softer” ways of seeing it means that the Holocaust must be seen as an evolutive process, or at least, the result of such evolution.
The harder ones see it without taking into account that evolutive movement, considering the assassination of the minority almost like an isolated case, that is, without looking at its possible discriminatory antecedents.
This conception of the soft definition could be linked to a period that started with the birth of the State of Nuremberg, in 1935. This episode began to pull down any hint of democracy or equality for the Jewish population. The racism was consolidating and in 1938 the Night of Broken Glass made its tragic appearance in world history with many German’s attacking and hurting not only the Jewish population, but also assaulting their business and stores. The process of manifesting this extreme hatred led subsequently to the “ghettoization”.
Personally, I have to say that in the past I resisted to believe the hard definitions of genocide that Jones propose. That would mean that the Nazis would have had no special discriminatory reasons to blame Jews and murder them for their existence. It is clear that the Holocaust, regarding the massacre of Jews, began because of discriminatory reasons; however, I used to agree with that soft point of view, which sees that this discrimination was different for that minority, and had finally nothing to do with other cases of injustice.
I obviously did not justify in any case what the NSDAP did to Jews, but it was easier and logic for me to think that this political branch had “special reasons”, meaning with this that they had clear convictions, about that group. I could not believe that it was taken without any major concern about the issue. There must have been more.
I would like to take advantage of this point of the essay to stablish a separation between the necessary explanation and the drastic change of my opinion. Everything changed when I first was conscious of the different positions that were taken in the Nuremberg Trials. Twenty-two Nazis were judged in those trials, where twelve of them were condemned to death.
The defence of the council started the trial supporting the principle of law: “nullum crimen, nullum poena sine lege”; which means that there is no penalty without law, this is, something can not be judged in some circumstances that differ from the ones that were current in the moment of the action. After I studied this position, I started to wonder what evil actually is.
Adolf Eichmann was one of the most important historical criminals of the Holocaust. Independently of the Nuremberg trials, he was judged in 1961. The Jew philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote a really controversial essay in which she exposed her point of view about the trial of Eichmann, where she thought, the justice was trying to judge the Nazism itself, instead of a man of flesh and bones. She exposed that man was another of the bureaucrats of Nazism, and not the monster that he was said to be.
The thing is that anything is black or white, and much less was the war. Eichmann was efficient in the tasks that were entrusted to him, even if those were so cruel that they were based in mass murder. The debate here is where is the limit of the legitimation to be cruel at war.
The Nazi State was a criminal state and disobeying it would translate in a violation of the law, it would be a crime against the State. This fact, summed to the bureaucratic power that the State exerts makes the evil come to converge into something banal (Arendt, 2003). The evil is certain and has been – and is – historically and naturally present, especially in times of war. In addition, normalized and institutionalised in most of war scenarios (López, 2017).
After long reflection, I had to accept the idea of that there was not a significant reason why Jews were specifically isolated, discriminated and murdered in the Nazi period. There was nothing unique for Nazis about being a Jew. Jews were just a threat for them. Antisemitism was as well naturalized as the wrong in the war was.
The program of the propaganda in this epoque played a crucial role. It was based on psychological techniques that used many symbols and influenced widely the popular masses. It must be understood in its own sociocultural context, so this is the only way to comprehend its real impact on society. People are more suggestible in crowds, as this way it diminishes their credibility. Hitler was aware of this, and knew that big assemblies were necessary, as the individual received in those ones the first impression of a great community.
Persuasion was the main objective. In the Nazi regime, the use of lies was vital. Hitler’s speeches lack of logical arguments on most occasions, the propagandist aims to convince with claims and emotions. Falsehood was more credible the greater it was. Propaganda had many tools, such as the use of messages that were full of emotional charge, the law of sympathy with the masses or the synthesizing of ideas; as intuition was above reasoning (Rodero, 2000). These explanations are not a justification for what happened, but a try to find the answer to the question: how this could have happened?
Moving into the original question; regarding the uniqueness of Holocaust, there were many scholars that argued the Holocaust had been the single and most important event beyond all other tragedies. Having exposed my vision, I must disagree with those.
On the one hand, the idea of the tragedy produced by one of the most civilized countries of the moment is based on an Eurocentric vision of the circumstances. The Cambodian genocide, which took place between 1975 and 1979, was, in percentage terms, the bigger genocide of history; and it was extensively supported by discriminatory arguments against minorities and religious groups such as the Buddhists.
The scale of the situation is comparable to the Holocaust, if we take into account the relativeness of the measures; however, why is it then much less known and acknowledged than the Jew’s one? Is it simply a consequence of the international magnitude of the World War? Or is there a chance to think that many other similar Holocausts in history have not received the same consideration as the Jewish one due to a biased perspective of its scholars?
On the other hand, Arendt claimed in her essay about the banalization of the evil that the trials celebrated after the Jewish Holocaust seemed to impose the most severe justice to culprits, blaming them for the idea of antisemitism itself, instead of for their possible own crimes. The allegations of the indictment basically maintained within the trials the general suffering of the victims but were not focused on individual illicit acts. Having the Holocaust as the cradle of the trials that condemned racism is a mistake to be recognised in the international background.
Having reached this point, I believe that I partly managed to find some reasons that can defend harder definitions of genocide in terms of the Jewish Holocaust. The banalization of the evil during the Second World War and its rutinary process shows that there is no special attribute about Jews to be considered to claim about why they were concretely elected to have that unfortunate role in the war.
This argument can also support the idea that the Jewish Holocaust was not an uniquely unique one – being evident the fact that all genocides are, in one way or another, unique, and definitely this one has been one of the most important of history due its repercussion –; since the evil can sadly be found in the most conventional ways, especially in time of war.
The wrong is all around the conflict. The Nazism had its tools, as we have observed with the propaganda, to help spread and banalize it. But this is nothing that has happened for the first time, neither in other supposedly civilised regions.
This was just another way of normalizing the bad that humanity suffers.
*When this article was published, Cristina Sánchez de Lara was a first year student of International Studies and Law at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
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