McMillan - How could this happen: explaining the Holocaust

HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN

Copyright 2014 by Dan McMillan

Published by Basic Books,

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Designed by Jack Lenzo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McMillan, Dan, Ph.D.

How could this happen : explaining the Holocaust / Dan McMillan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-03664-6 (ebook) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)Causes. 2. GermanySocial conditions19181933. 3. GermanySocial conditions19331945. 4. GermanyPolitics and government19331945. I. Title.

D804.3.M398 2014

940.531811dc23

2013051212

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

And we dare speak on behalf of our knowledge? We dare say: I know?... Answers: I say there are none.

Elie Wiesel

Why another book on the Holocaust? Because even the best histories of this catastrophe tell us how it happened, but not why. For each of the most important events of historyfor example, the fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and World War Ithere are many books that try to explain why the event occurred. Yet for the Holocaust we seek in vain for a book on its causes. To be sure, most narrative accounts of the Holocaust will touch on anti-Semitism, and some will also examine how Adolf Hitler managed to gain control of Germany. Yet, although Hitler and anti-Semitism were vitally important causes of the Holocaust, they form only part of the story, and not even the largest part. Even worse, the explanation of these causes usually gets lost in the mass of details that make up the narrative, and the frustrated reader finishes the book still having exactly the same question that moved him or her to start reading in the first place: Why did this happen?

It is not enough to narrate the blow-by-blow of events. A reader who wants to know why these events happened needs a book that clearly defines each cause of the Holocaust, explains its historical origins, and clarifies how it combined with the other causes to produce the most terrifying genocide in history. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the causes of the Holocaust. This is surprising, given the fact that professional historians understand the causes quite well. Ask any group of specialists, and they can easily produce a list of major factors: Germanys failure to become a democracy until 1918, decades after France, England, and the United States made that transition; the pointless slaughter of World War I, in which 10 million young men lost their lives; the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, without whom the Holocaust would not have happened; the increase in anti-Semitism during the four decades before Hitler took office, and its causes; the rise of scientific racism, the widespread belief that major genetic differences between races or nationalities was a scientifically proven fact; and psychological mechanisms that can make it easy for men to kill or allow bystanders to look the other way.

A book like this one should have been written a long time ago. If historians understand the several causes of the Holocaust, why is this book the first to pull all the causes together and explain them in straightforward language? Why have historians hesitated to undertake this vitally necessary task? Some fear that explaining the killers motives and actions might seem to lessen their guilt. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi warned against trying to understand the murderers, because to understand is almost to justify. Yet every murderer acted with free will and had no reason to fear punishment if he refused to commit murder. No explanation can diminish the killers terrible guilt. Others assume that it honors the victims and does justice to their suffering to say the Holocaust was so terrible that we cannot understand it. The Auschwitz survivor and Nobel

The Holocaust frightens people like no other event in history, evoking an instinctive horror and loathing that almost compel us to look away from it. The special horror of the Holocaust may derive from the way the Nazis completely denied the worth of human life. They declared a very large branch of humanitymany millions of Jews worldwideto be a kind of vermin in human form that they intended to completely exterminate. With anti-Semitism, said Heinrich Himmler, the chief organizer of the Holocaust, it is exactly as with delousing.... It is a matter of cleanliness.... We will soon be completely free of lice. The Jews are the only large ethnic group to have been targeted for complete extinction, a fact that sets the Holocaust apart from all other genocides. Not only did the Nazis set out to murder every Jewish person they could find, but they also reduced them to material objects, processing their bodies for value as if they were animal carcasses: they cut off womens hair to make textiles, tore out teeth to harvest gold fillings, and used Jewish prisoners as laboratory animals.

In the first years after World War II, observers dismissed the murderers as a relatively limited number of born criminals, social misfits, and the mentally unhinged. This comforting illusion soon evaporated, and historians found that the overwhelming majority of killerswho may have numbered as many as 200,000were perfectly ordinary human beings who did not differ from us in their basic psychological makeup, or at least not until they began their careers as murderers. Even worse, many tens of thousands

When normal men and women commit historys most radical assault on human dignity, we face terrible questions. Is every one of us capable of such boundless depravity? If the Nazis could completely deny their victims humanity, does any human being have inherent worth and an unquestioned right to life? If civilizations fundamental moral standards could lose all of their authority, how can one find meaning and purpose to human existence? If one of the worlds most advanced nations could sink this low, what kind of dark and violent future lies in store for humanity?

I first confronted these awful questions as a teenager in the 1970s, when I read a book about the Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthals The Murderers Among Us. To be able to live with such questions, and to maintain the faith in human goodness that has always given meaning to my life, I needed to understand why the Holocaust happened, and what it did or did not say about humankind. This need has shaped the course of my life ever since: I became completely fluent in German, double-majored in history and German in college, spent my junior year at the Freie Universitt in West Berlin, and earned a history PhD from Columbia University. I then taught history at universities in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, read everything I could about the Holocaust, constantly refined my understanding of its causes, and searched relentlessly for ways to explain these causes as clearly and concisely as I could. Throughout, I never lost sight of the central question: What does it mean to be human in the aftermath of the Holocaust?