Online Publication Date: 4-Apr-2008

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Well over two-hundred and fifty-million people were killed in the Twentieth Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated two-hundred million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany.

According to our conventional way of thinking, nation-states are essentially peaceful and strive to do good things. But occasionally wars or acts of genocide break out. The technique for intervening to prevent political violence that follows from this way of thinking is that of "conflict resolution." If nation-states resolve their differences by reasoning together, then violent political acts will not occur.

The evidence suggests that this model of political violence is false. Based on what occurred in the Twentieth Century—and continues to occur in the Twenty-First—it is more reasonable to hypothesize that there is something inherent within the nature of the nation-state that generates mass-murder. Nations kill a lot of people.  What I wish to focus on in this paper is a case study of how nation-states kill people. I'll discuss the relationship between genocide and warfare in Hitler's Germany, a topic I've been researching for over forty years.

Turkey played a significant role in the First World War.  In the fighting at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, Mustafa Kemal brought his troops to the area where Australians troops were coming ashore and pushing up the slopes. Before the encounter between the two forces, Kemal addressed his troops, uttering a phrase that has become famous. "Men," he declared, "I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die." It seems that just as political leaders can murder people deemed foreign or "not one of us," so they can order the deaths of their own people, specifically soldiers.

The following passages evoke something with which we are familiar:  "We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car; the smell of pus, urine, and it was cold. We lay on straw. The train waited for hours." "Food was our most difficult problem. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty and the horizon was devoid of any hope." "We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live."

"The inability to bathe led to incredibly filthy conditions, which inevitably resulted in a plague of lice. We felt like livestock rather than human beings." "There is only anxiety, fear, and terror, a life without return along with terror without an end." "The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being."

These passages of course sound like descriptions of death camps written by Jews. In actuality, they are letters written home by German soldiers from the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Like Jews in the death camps, German soldiers—in places like Stalingrad— were starving, freezing and dying.

Hitler was one of sixty-five million men who fought in the First World War, an instance of mass-slaughter generated by nation states. Nine-million men were killed in this war and nearly thirty-million wounded or reported missing. During the period of 1914-1918 across Europe and in the wider world, men were killed on an average of more than six-thousand per day.

Hitler was one of millions who was compelled to hunker down in a trench, and to endure the wet and cold and mud, scarcity of food, rats, bedbugs, and the endless artillery barrages that reigned down upon the pathetic men huddled in holes below the ground. He witnessed the dismemberment and death of hundreds of his comrades—and experienced the stench of their decaying bodies. Over four-thousand men in his regiment were killed, but Hitler miraculously survived. Two-million German men died in this war and millions more suffered injuries. Hitler was lying in a hospital bed—blinded by poison gas—when the war ended in November 1918.

Hitler was traumatized by Germany's defeat. Had the death of two-million German men been in vain? Hitler became obsessed with the idea that Jewish men had avoided military service—even though this was not the case—they served and died in the same proportion as German men. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that when he returned from the front he was surprised to discover that "all the clerks were Jews and all the Jews were clerks."

Why had Jews not been serving and dying at the front like German men? Why had the best men sacrificed their lives for Germany whereas the worst men had survived? These questions haunted and tormented Hitler. He declared that if there was a war in the future, the next time Jews would die too.

One might expect—based on the horrors he had experienced and witnessed and his knowledge of the massive number of German deaths—that Hitler would have condemned and renounced warfare. But he did not. He refused to acknowledge that the deaths of two-million German men had been in vain and that warfare is horrible and futile. On the contrary, Hitler continued to glorify war and the idea of sacrificial death.

Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that when in the war years death had snatched "so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks," it would have been a "sin to complain" because after all were these young men not "dying for Germany." Insofar as the young men had died for Germany, Hitler claimed that their deaths had not been a bad thing. He was in a state of denial. He continued to believe in the goodness of Germany—in spite of the fact that his nation had caused the deaths of millions of its soldiers.

One might imagine at least that the German Generals who planned and executed the war—Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenberg—would have been hated and excoriated by Hitler and the German people. However, this was not the case. On the contrary, the two generals became national heroes. Von Hindenburg was elected second President of the Weimar Republic in 1925 and re-elected in 1932.

The trauma of Germany's defeat in the First World War motivated Hitler to enter politics. He sought revenge and to reverse the outcome. If he became national leader, he would wage another war—and things would turn out differently. Or perhaps Hitler sought to initiate another war because he believed that the sacrificial dying of the First World War had been insufficient. He would bring about an even more monumental episode of sacrificial slaughter.

We will omit the story of Hitler's rise to power and fast-forward to when he became Chancellor of Germany and Fuhrer—a dictator with absolute power. Immediately, he began fantasizing about war. Hitler understood that another war would require—like the First World War—the sacrifice of millions of German soldiers. But why should this deter him? Had not Ludendorff and von Hindenburg become national heroes in spite of the blood bath over which they had presided?

If Germany and its leaders had no compunctions about sending millions of German men into battle in the First World War, why should he hesitate to do the same in a Second World War? Was he not Commander-in-Chief of the army of a great nation? In a series of conversations with Herman Rauschning in the mid-thirties, Hitler declared that it was his duty to wage war "regardless of losses."

"We all know what world war means," Hitler said. "We must shake off sentimentality and be hard. Some day when I go to war I shall not hesitate because of ten million men I shall be sending to their deaths." Preparing for the slaughter of his own men, Hitler foresaw or predicted events that in the future he would bring to fruition.

The essence of Nazism was fanatic devotion to Hitler and Germany. The most important organizations in Nazi Germany took an oath of absolute allegiance and obedience.  Hitler Youth at age 10 swore that they were "willing and ready to give up their lives" for Adolf Hitler. Upon entering the army, German men vowed that as courageous soldiers they would be prepared to offer their lives "at any time." While the oath of the SS-Man included his vow to be "obedient unto death." Young German men, in short, agreed to die when Hitler and the German leadership asked them to do so.

In September 1939, Hitler launched the war he had been dreaming about, attacking Poland. In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. As the attack against the Soviet Union began, General von Rundstedt asked his soldiers to emulate the examples of their brothers in the First World War and to "die in the same way," to be unswerving and obedient and to go "happily and as a matter of course to his death." Like the Turkish leader Kemal, von Runstedt was asking his soldiers—not to fight, but to die.

By late 1941, German soldiers already were beginning to die in massive numbers. Hitler's prophecy about the sacrificial death of millions of men was coming true. German soldiers went into battle and fulfilled their vows to be obedient unto death. They went like sheep to the slaughter.

The Holocaust began—not in the gas chambers—but in the towns and villages of the Soviet Union. As the German army moved Eastward in late 1941 and early 1942, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units. Jews were dragged from their homes, brought into fields—and shot. Often they were compelled to dig ditches and buried en masse in gorges that bear an eerie resemblance to the trenches of the First World War.

It is estimated that a million-and-a-half Jews were killed in the Soviet Union before the death camps became operative. Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the murder of men, women, and children, proclaiming: "If I don't mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret for the spilling of precious German blood, then I naturally also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin."

This statement reveals the meaning of the Holocaust. Hitler seemed to be saying: "If I have the right—as military leader of a great nation—to send the best Germans to their deaths, why do I not also have the right to order the deaths of Jews—mortal enemies of the German people?" Why should German soldiers be required to sacrifice their lives while Jews get off scot-free?

We have noted that Hitler believed Jews had evaded their duty to die for Germany in the First World War. Virtuous German soldiers had sacrificed their lives, but selfish Jews had not. Hitler was determined that this next time it would be different. Once again, German soldiers would die for their country—this is what war is about—but this time Jews would have to die too.

In the First World War, German soldiers were transported to battle in cattle-cars: the same kind of trains that transported Jews to the death camps. Historian Denis Winters notes that after a stint at base, the railway lines took German soldiers to the front: "To a generation with visual memories of the railway lines running into Hitler's death camps," Winters observes, there is "something disconcerting about the imagery of this journey from the base camp. Soldiers went in wagons of the same type, forty of them in each wagon, kit hanging from hooks in the roof. Death was a high probability for both generations of travelers in these cattle cars."

It is disconcerting to realize that just as Jews were sent in cattle-cars to die in the Holocaust, so German soldiers had been sent to die in identical cattle-cars. Was Hitler trying to tell us something? Was he attempting to say: "Just as the German government sent me and my comrades to be slaughtered in the First World War, so I—as representative of the German government—will send Jews to be slaughtered." Hitler reasoned that if Germany had been willing to kill its best people, it also had the right to kill the worst people: Jews, the nation's racial enemy.

Nine-million men were killed in the First World War. In a typical battle, men were asked to get out of trenches and run toward the opposing trench—where they were gunned down by machine-gun fire and artillery shells. The same battle strategy persisted for four years in spite of its obvious futility. Men continued to be slaughtered, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month.

Historians to this day—after nearly one-hundred years of research—cannot figure out why the war—with its disastrous, futile battle strategy—continued. After four years, nothing had been accomplished—except that now nine-million men were dead. All we can say with confidence about World War I is that nations killed a lot of people.

On some level, Hitler understood that the First World War—and warfare in general—was about the slaughter of young men. In another conversation with Herman Rauschning in the mid-thirties, Hitler stated that when the time was ripe, he would be prepared for the "blood sacrifice of another young German generation." He would not hesitate to take the deaths of two or three million German soldiers on his conscience "fully aware of the heaviness of the sacrifice."

Hitler was true to the words that he had spoken, fulfilling his fantasy. He waged a war that led to the deaths of seven million Germans—civilians joining soldiers in a massive sacrificial ritual. The majority of German fatalities occurred in the final year of the war when the German military knew that the situation was hopeless. Nearly 500,000 German soldiers died per month in 1945 during  the last four months of the war—probably the most concentrated case of mass-slaughter in human history. Told that 15,000 German officers had died in a futile attempt to defend Berlin in the last month of the war, Hitler declared, "But that's what young men are for."

I hypothesize that Hitler's thinking about genocide grew out of his understanding of the logic of warfare, that is, his realization that war represents the occasion when nations sacrifice their own soldiers. Perhaps Hitler reasoned: "If society gives me the right—as commander-and-chief of a great nation—to order my soldiers to die, why do I not also have the right to order Jews—mortal enemies of the German people—to die?"

Most people distinguish between war and genocide. However destructive and wasteful war is, the military and warfare are viewed as normal or normative dimensions of human societies. We take war for granted. But genocide is considered an anomaly. People were shocked to discover that nearly six-million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. But were they shocked—are we shocked today—when we learn that over fifty-million people were killed in the Second World War?

I had been studying the Holocaust for twenty years when—in 1989—I roved across the stacks at the NYU library and began reading about the First World War. I was astonished when I learned about how young men had been asked to get out of trenches for four years and run into machine-gun fire and artillery shells. "Incomprehensible," I said to myself, the word people use to describe their reaction upon learning about the Holocaust.

However, it soon became evident that my incredulousness was not shared by historians. In spite of the magnitude of the slaughter, those who documented the war seemed calm and unperturbed when describing what had occurred. It seems that mass-murder in warfare is taken for granted. The slaughter of young men in battle does not evoke astonishment.

In creating the Final Solution, Hitler perhaps was trying to tell us something about the First World War: to depict the horrific things that occur when a nation-state takes over the bodies of human beings and asks them to become obedient unto death. Hitler could not say how awful the First World War was, even though he had experienced its horror. He—like all of us—was in a state of denial. He refused to acknowledge that Germany was killing its own soldiers.

He could not say what he knew, but Hitler produced a demonstration or enactment. He replicated the previous slaughter. The Jew in the death camps symbolized the German soldier in the First World War. The Jew in the death camp portrayed what happens when a nation-state takes over the body of a human being and asks this human being to become obedient unto death.

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 for the welfare of a new Europe." If German soldiers had been forced to submit to the leadership and undergo a horrible, painful ordeal, Jews would be obligated to undergo an even more horrible, painful ordeal.

We return to the words written by German soldiers, dying in the Soviet Union: "We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car." "We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live." "The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being."

The German soldier has been portrayed as an aggressive warrior. However, on the battlefields of Russia, he became a pathetic victim: starving, freezing, and dying in the snow. Jews in the death camps depicted the repressed reality of the experience of the German soldier. The death camps portray the abjection and degradation that is contained within the idea of "dying for Germany.

The Nazis glorified willingness to die for the nation and its leaders. The fate of the dead German soldier was conceived as the apotheosis of noble submission. The Holocaust portrays submission to the nation-state—dying for the country—stripped of honor and glory. Like German soldiers, Jews submitted to the nation-state and died when compelled to do so. No one, however, would characterize the Jew's death as honorable and noble.