By İvo Molinas
Editor's note: This guest commentary was originally published in Turkish in Şalom on January 4, 2012, and is republished in English by Bosphorus News with the author's permission.
İvo Molinas is a Turkish Jewish journalist, writer and editor-in-chief of Şalom, Turkey's Jewish weekly newspaper.
"An antisemite cannot live unless he finds an enemy he wants to destroy."
Jean-Paul Sartre's sentence remains one of the sharpest openings into the psychology of hatred. It also leads directly to one of the most difficult historical questions of the modern age: how could the Holocaust happen with such scale, system and participation?
The Holocaust, the Nazi genocide against the Jews, remains a historical question whose psychological and sociological consequences continue to generate debate. Six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were murdered because they belonged to the Jewish religion and people. The scale of the killing, and the bureaucratic and social machinery that made it possible, still stands almost beyond memory.
Antisemitism was never confined to Germany. It appeared across the diaspora wherever Jews tried to live. In central Europe, especially from the 19th century onward, Jews increasingly became targets of social, economic and political anger. They were blamed for Germany's defeat in World War I, for the country's loss of power on the old continent and for the Bolshevik threat.
The program announced by the National Socialist German Workers' Party in February 1920 made that ideology explicit. Article 4 declared that only those of German blood could be citizens of Germany, and that no Jew could therefore be a German citizen. The antisemitism written into the party program was one of the early alarm bells of the Holocaust.
The party that claimed to speak for public sentiment came to power in March 1933 with 44 percent of the vote, placing one of history's most murderous dictators at the center of human affairs. Hitler's antisemitism quickly produced new measures. Verbal and physical attacks against Jews culminated in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship.
Then came Kristallnacht, the "Final Solution" decided at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, and finally the network of labor and death camps that became the most visible milestones of the Nazi project.
The demon gnawing at the world
When the Soviet Army entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, it recorded images that still seem almost impossible to believe. The war was nearing its end. Of the 9.5 million Jews who had lived in Europe, six million had been destroyed by the Nazis.
Hitler and his inner circle made the decisions. Yet the people who carried out this singular brutality came from every segment and class of German society. The national project to destroy the Jewish people was presented as a plan to rid the world of a "demon gnawing at the world" and to purify the German race of the Jews.
The plan was not completed, but even unfinished, it left one of the darkest stains in human history.
Its implementation required almost an entire society. Bureaucrats thinking about their careers; thousands of workers laying railway tracks; German intellectuals who did not oppose the Nuremberg Laws; lawyers considering how to divide Jewish property; judges and prosecutors applying the laws; chemical engineers; engineers who designed and built death camps; doctors conducting acts of extreme cruelty on Jewish bodies; businesspeople seizing the opportunities opened by the removal of Jews from economic life; and religious authorities who remained largely silent as events unfolded.
What lay beneath the conduct of Germans who could shoot even small children in the head without blinking? Can a rational explanation be given for the tens of thousands of guards who worked in 1,600 labor and death camps and carried out massacres without hesitation?
In a city as relatively small as Berlin, where 645 labor camps existed, it was impossible for the population not to notice them. What does it mean, in terms of human behavior, that the enormous evil committed there did not move ordinary Germans, and that many gave it support? Does such brutality require a logical explanation at all?
Eliminationist antisemitism
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the American Holocaust scholar, put forward a controversial thesis in his 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners. He argued that those who carried out the Holocaust did not participate in the killing merely because they were obeying orders, or because they feared punishment for breaking the law. On the contrary, he argued, they joined the violence willingly and knowingly. They were, in effect, Hitler's voluntary executioners.
Goldhagen argued that the Germans possessed a particular kind of antisemitism, one that had accumulated across centuries in German society and finally turned into "eliminationist antisemitism." These executioners believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. They carried out their duties fully and willingly in the project to cleanse the German race of the Jews.
The fact that many perpetrators were proud, content and at peace with what they did made the task of the decision-makers far easier and played a major role in the killings. These were not merely criminals detached from society. They were people who thought, debated, participated in active life and went to church. The force that pushed such a community toward this vast and savage common behavior was an antisemitism injected into their ancestors and finally into themselves, then internalized over generations.
Such intense hatred of Jews led to popular participation in the work of the "Final Solution," the total destruction of the Jewish people.
Goldhagen's thesis gains force from a comparison with Mussolini's Italy, where similar laws existed but no such systematic and voluntary project ever developed.
According to Goldhagen, the basic reason for the behavior of Germans who participated in the Holocaust lay in German antisemitism, which had developed differently from antisemitism in other European countries. Jews, in this worldview, had lived for a thousand years as parasites, stealing and exploiting others, and therefore had to be forced into heavy and deadly labor. Because they supposedly used hidden powers to damage the reputation of nations, they had to be humiliated. Because they allegedly caused suffering through conspiracies, their own bodies had to suffer constantly.
These views were shared by almost all Germans. As a Swedish report put it, the Germans had a new god: race. And human beings were being sacrificed to that god.
Is evil innate?
While Goldhagen, in effect, described nearly all Germans as willing agents of evil, another Jewish thinker, Hannah Arendt, had given the Holocaust and the definition of evil a very different meaning years earlier.
After Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer, was captured in Argentina in 1960 and put on trial in Jerusalem, Arendt followed the proceedings and developed her own theory of evil.
For Kant, evil has always existed in human beings and is directly connected to will. Human beings are not born evil or guilty by nature. Evil is an impulse that only rational creatures can choose. In other words, as rational beings, humans accept or reject evil through reason. It emerges through their final choice.
The conscious selection of evil contained in Goldhagen's phrase "willing executioners" overlaps with Kant's view. Arendt, however, created a new submeaning within the definition of evil. She developed an original theory of evil as something banal, ordinary and routinized.
When Arendt watched Eichmann at his trial, she saw that he resembled all "normal" people. His face did not create the impression of a monster. Psychologically, he did not appear exceptional. Primo Levi put the matter with painful clarity: the Nazis were made of the same cloth as us. Like us, they were sometimes mediocre, sometimes of average intelligence, and within normal limits of bad behavior. They did not have the face of the devil. They had faces like ours.
For Arendt, Eichmann was an ordinary evil man, because he, like many Nazis, had merely tried to fulfill his duty in accordance with the law. In his defense, Eichmann even referred to the Kantian idea of absolute obedience and conformity to one's duties and responsibilities.
In one sense, Eichmann committed evil not by violating the law but by obeying it. This form of behavior, because it follows the reflex of legal obedience without regard for the consequences or even awareness of them, must be understood as a form of ordinary evil.
For Arendt, Eichmann's conduct was the expression of an obedient character who was not conscious of doing evil and who merely fulfilled his duty by following the law.
His murders, then, were not the product of demonic genius. He simply obeyed, without question, the rules of Hitler's fascist plan to remove Jews from the face of the earth forever.
For Arendt, Eichmann's crimes were the result of an average and ordinary person using the power and position he possessed in the climate of fascism, without listening to his conscience, automatically and unconsciously, within a society that had asked him to be a good individual, a good state official and a good citizen.
This ordinary evil, or the banality of evil, is not demonic.
Arendt's theory was developed almost entirely from the rhetoric of Eichmann's own defense. For that reason, it faced serious criticism. She was accused of diminishing the Holocaust and of making antisemitism appear ordinary.
The greatest danger in Arendt's argument may be that it allows each of us, in daily life, to avoid assuming responsibility for our own harmful behavior.
Goldhagen's and Arendt's theories contain opposing arguments, but both deserve to be taken seriously by social scientists. Each shows how, in a fascist climate, human beings can take part, both individually and collectively, in the dehumanization of the other. Each also shows how this base ideology can make the individual capable of monstrous evil.
After all this, and with certain events of our own time in mind, we have the right to ask a deadly question.
If Hannah Arendt's executioners are to be called "ordinary evil" individuals, what name shall we give to the great majority who merely watch evil?
Or are we all to become angels?
References
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Antisemite, Salyangoz Publishing, March 2008
- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, March 1996
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Felsefe Kurumu Publishing, December 1994
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin
Sources: Şalom archive, İvo Molinas author permission, Bosphorus News translation and editing.