Hitler, the Holocaust and War: The Final Solution
Date posted: June 8, 2011 | by Richard Koenigsberg | Comments
Warfare articulates devotion to the nation: the willingness to sacrifice young men in the name of sacred ideals. This willingness to kill and die for one’s nation is viewed as the highest form of virtue. War exists to express this virtue, and the soldier is required to submit absolutely: obedience unto death. Hitler illuminates and reveals this fundamental ideology of the 20th century, the devotion to the nation-state, turning it from the highest virtue into a crime.
Nations are given “the right to kill” because sacrifice for the ideal is considered good. One proves one’s love for one’s nation by virtue of the sacrifices one is willing to make in its name. People prove their love by virtue of their willingness to die.
According to Nazi ideology, dying for Germany was the highest virtue and the apogee of devotion. The essence of Nazism—Hitler’s deepest desire—was that Germans should die for Germany.
Hitler was not content that only soldiers die for Germany, as occurred in the First World War. He insisted that everyone should die for the country: millions of enemy soldiers and civilians, Jews, as well as his own people (both soldiers and civilians). What was unique about Hitler is that he took the political belief that defines the modern world—the idea that nations have the right to kill—and carried it to an absurd, bizarre conclusion. The central dynamic of warfare revolves around the will to kill or to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country.
This is how one proves that one believes in one’s nation and its sacred ideals. Fighting a war (killing others) and sacrificing one’s soldiers constitutes a demonstration of devotion. Jews for Hitler represented a negation of this proposition: they symbolized the idea that it is not sweet and fitting to die for a country—that death in war is meaningless and futile.
The idea that some people were not obliged to sacrifice their lives for Germany enraged Hitler. “Why had my comrades died in the First World War [2 million German soldiers perished]? Why was I blinded in a poison gas attack [Hitler almost died] while people at home were safe and secure?” In the Second World War, everyone—not just the young men—would have to submit to sacrifice. No one would get off scot-free.
If society gives me the right to kill my nation’s most valuable people, Hitler reflected, surely I have the right to kill the least valuable as well. In the Second World War, Jews would not be exempt. They too (like German soldiers) would be required to be obedient unto death. If German soldiers on the Eastern Front were undergoing a horrible ordeal, that suffered by Jews would have to be even more terrible. Jews in the death camps depict and reveal the abject condition of the German soldier in war, but where the soldier’s death was conceived as heroic and praiseworthy, no one would characterize the death of a Jew in the camp as such.
Hitler knew the actuality of warfare. He had been there and experienced the horror. But he could not say what he knew. He refused (as we all do) to say that his own country was cruel and evil—and that it had condemned millions of German soldiers to die and be maimed. He refused to abandon his beloved nation.
Rather, Hitler created the death camps in order to portray the ugliness of submission to the nation-state. Jews enacted the fate of a body that has been given over to—taken over by—the nation, depicting death at the hands of the state stripped of words like honor and glory. By subtracting these words, heroic sacrifice become abject, degrading submission.
I’m sure this was unintentional, but the essay seems to perpetuate the idea that Jews were “exempt” from fighting for Germany and her allies in World War I. The facts, of course, are quite otherwise: the proportion of Jewish men who were in the army, were front-line soldiers, were decorated for valour and/or wounded, was in fact higher than the national average.
Hitler’s misperception of the Jews as shirkers was the product of his anti-Semitism, not vice versa.
Why this endless insistence that what Hitler did had anything to do with a rational assessment of reality?
It didn’t matter what the Jews did or did not do in the First World War. It did not matter what the Jews were or how they behaved.
Hitler behaved based on a FANTASY about the Jew. Why would one assume that Hitler had done a “survey” and concluded that Jews were shirkers?
I may be missing something essential here, but nations can commit crimes as a body politic, just as a single man can do. Europe prior to the Second World War was a tinderbox, and there were demagogues there, waiting to light the fire. Ultra-nationalists existed in France as well as Germany, it was not just a German problem. There were serious problems all over the place, because WWI did not finish the fight, and it was inevitable that another war of the same nature would be fought.
It is simply that in Germany the concoction was at its strongest. Recall that Hitler mesmerized his crowds with tirades about “being stabbed in the back”. He lambasted them with that and many other things; and they were receptive. Someone had to be to blame besides themselves for the calamity that had befallen Germany.
And someone was in a sense, because Europe itself was at fault, they placed upon Germany a price for reparations that was too heavy to pay. Common sense, showing pity and rendering a dignified defeat did not rule the day, a spirit of vengeance did. France and England share much of the fault in starting WWII. Because they did not show compassion, they showed a fist and demanded payment for redress of wrongs. I am unsure of Americas role in the shenanigans that transpired, but she was not faultless either.
America has a loathsome tendency to think that once the shooting is over, the war is ended. What great thing did President Wilson propose? Why The Fourteen Points of course. While they were excellent points and well worth consideration, they themselves missed the point. When President Wilson talked about Alsace-Lorraine for instance, he had a valid argument. However, it was one of the very things that Hitler was to rant on and one of the causes of the Second World War.
If President Wilson really wanted to solve that vexation, he should have prepared to have America as the enforcement arm of it. Then it would have been a horse of a different color. Did the average intellectual in America read Mein Kampf and trust in Hitlers word to carry through with it? Are you kidding?
We as a nation were powerless to stop what came about, it was going to come. But, we did not so much as take it seriously, we laughed at the funny little man with the mustache.
This may have turned into a verbose response, but I think that you seem to have missed some key thinking here. What was left for Germany, but to fight? We had seen fit to take every dime they had to pay war reparations. The Western powers were blind to the things that people will do, when they cannot eat, because they do not have enough money.
I found this quote as I was looking things up:
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.” – John Berger
Yes, it is in some ways supernatural, as it is transcendent. A lot of compassion may have averted both World Wars.
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/compassion#ixzz1Ojb0hwC5
The view expressed in your essay has as its predecessor in a series of papers published in an old journal, The Journal of Psychohistory. The writing published that nations must send their youth into war as a sacrifice to attone for the nations’ sins. It even proposed that the reasons for the antiabortion movement was to preserve the youth until they could be sacrificed on the battlefield. This concept is seen as an ancient one, even expressed in the Bible, even though the sacrifice was in itself aborted ans a paen against this practice.
This concerns a relatively minor point in your essay. The physician in charge of the hospital to wich Hitler was set, diagnosed his “blindness” as a hysterical reaction not biologicl (physical) effect of gas
In my practice, I frequently conduct deep healing processes with children and grandchildren of Jews and Germans who endured the Nazi era. As victims, the suffering of the Jews is well documented and respected. For the children of German soldiers who died on the Eastern Front or committed Holocaust atrocities, their father’s suffering is typically unacknowledged.
I appreciate your calling attention that the horror of death were not the exclusive experience of Jews. This is not meant to diminish their pain or excuse their perpetrators.
The Final Solution did not exterminate the Jews, but it did destroy the Nazi dream of conquest and also an essential quality of Judaism. In 1946, my father was Director of the UNRA DP Camp at Fohrenwalk. This was the crucible where European Jewry and German Nazism perished. Out of this cauldron, the modern German and Israelis states were created. The nation-states that elevate such horrific fates to virtues still exist.
I believe there is a major component missing in this and similar analyses: another side of how Hitler came to power. The received view is that this rise was possible because of his charismatic, hypnotic appeal, along with his popular message and a receptive population. Thus, it is seen as a phenomenon that was more or less internal to Germany (although often it is also acknowledged that there were some external factors — especially the conditions imposed by the Versailles treaty; the Allies’ isolationism; their underestimation of the Nazi threat). It certainly is true that in various noxious ways, for hundreds of years Germany’s soil had been prepared for something like Nazism (but so have been, and are, soils elsewhere in the world).
Nevertheless, the major, indeed crucial, missing element in the story of Hitler’s rise to power is that his movement had been on the verge of collapse, financially bankrupt, and that it survived and blossomed only because it was rescued by massive financial and techonological help provided by various powerful political, economic and, especially, industrial forces in the Western world. They propped him up because they were petrified of communism, petrified that capitalism and its huge profits wouldn’t survive a popular awakening and revolt. They saw Hitler as the way to stop its spread in Europe, considering him to be by far the lesser of two evils — just another instance of Western powers’ continuing policy of supporting anyone anywhere who perpetuates capitalism, our profit-mad, globe- and humanity-destroying way of life.
So, all too often we continue to enable the most repressive, horrendous, genocide-committing, war-waging dictators to acquire and remain in power.
An aside: It is interesting to me as a clinician that this unwelcome, shameful truth has mostly been pushed out of sight, repressed –just as have other, similar and highly important “inconvenient truths”. The complex psychological defenses against truly becoming aware of any of these are massive — and highly effective. (For a telling critique see Walter Davis’ “Deracination” [SUNY, 2001], an acute, sophisticated psychological analysis of the repressive way we have dealt with any unwelcome, difficult feelings we might have individually and as a nation about bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
Unfortunately, this is just another manifestation of our inability as individuals and as a nation to confront unpleasant, or threatening, realities — see, for example, our pathetically inadequate ways of dealing with our ecological and nuclear crises — or, for that matter, with the use of cell phones while driving, or with the epidemic of obesity. Needless to say, unless we are willing and able to change our ways drastically and fundamentally, then at some point, in some way, global extinction is more than likely, and probably not to distant, either.
My father who was jewish volunteered in World War One for the German Imperial army. He was wounded in the Battle of Verdun and was awarded the Iron Cross, first class, by then Marshall Hindenburg. Many other jewish German soldiers also earned the similar decoration. A thousand jews died fighting for Germany in World War One. A corespondent in germany wrote to me that during World War II, the Nazis erased the names of fallen Jews from war memorials in Germany.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War Two, they were re-inscribed on the monuments. Unfortunately, two of my uncles were deported and fell victims during the Holocaust even though they had earned the Iron Cross in World War One. So much, as my father of blessed memory, said to me; “So much for the thanks of the Fatherland.”