I have been meaning to recommend "Auschwitz", the BBC documentary that concentrates on the death camp of the title, but deals with the Holocaust in general too. It is currently showing on the ABC in Australia on Thursday nights.
It's a well made series, with a good balance between "talking head" interviews (both with survivors and some of the perpetrators) and dramatisations of various events.
Looking at the BBC website, it is clear that a lot of care went into the dramatisations. Some of them are precise re-enactments, filmed in the same location where the events took place. No wonder these scenes have such an authentic feel. (Actual locations featured a lot in Schindler's List too, if I recall.)
Still, in such documentaries, for emotional impact it is hard to beat first hand accounts delivered by the witnesses. This series does take more interest than most in the story from the other side. These interviews tend to be fairly short, however, and while most of the old men seem to regret their involvement now, they don't usually come across as being too haunted by it.
This week's episode was most upsetting when covering the (foreign national) Jewish children taken from occupied France. About 4,000 were separated from their families and deported; none of them survived. If you have children yourself, hearing such stories is particularly affecting.
When one aging Nazi soldier was asked about this, about how he could believe at the time that children deserved this fate (even if you believed that adult Jews were the source of all evil), he said (as best as I can recall) that they knew the children themselves were not responsible, but it was the Jewish blood in them that they feared and believed they had to eradicate.
This has been said by several of old soldiers; they genuinely believed at the time that Jews were so bad they deserved their fate.
I don't know a lot about this topic in particular - about how so many Germans could be so strongly convinced that the Jews deserved death. (OK, it is debatable how many German citizens without direct involvement in camps knew that the Jews were being exterminated. But in the BBC show it is often the men who were personally doing or witnessing the killing who are saying this.) I know the generalities about Nazi propaganda against the Jews. What I have trouble comprehending is how successful it was. And it wasn't as if Jews were more capable of being considered "non humans" because they were out of sight and not observable.
This is why it is worth revisiting this topic every few years. It is almost incomprehensible, yet it occurred.
There was a book out in the last few years that did deal with the issue of how responsible the German people has a whole should be seen. Guess I should just track it down and read it.
Finally, while looking around the Web at a few Holocaust sites before I posted, I found that there are actual photos of Amon Goeth, the commandant of the camp in Schindler's List, with his rifle on his balcony. (If you recall from the movie, shooting inmates from his balcony was one of his hobbies.) I didn't think the movie was a likely exaggeration, but I was still surprised to find photos of him which appear to confirm this habit.
"And it wasn't as if Jews were more capable of being considered "non humans" because they were out of sight and not observable."
ReplyDeleteBut they were *mentally* out of sight as far as being fellow members of the human community, and this sort of progressive dehumanization is precisely the sort of thing that has underlain genocides in general. As a Jew myself, I've spent decades studying the history of Holocausts the world over, and you constantly see the same pattern in others.
In fact, when it comes to Holocausts, the Nazis-- as horrendous as they were-- were mere amateurs in comparison to the British in the Victorian period. They were the world champions of genocide-- the Victorians were probably responsible for more genocides than any other society in history, perpetrated through deliberate actions rather than merely a by-product of communicable diseases. This is especially true in the case of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Tasmania.
You think the European Holocaust of the 1940's was bad? As incalculably repugnant as it was, the British in the 1800's top the Nazis by leaps and bounds. They exterminated 80-90% of the Tasmanian and Australian aboriginal peoples, through policies that rewarded British officials who slaughtered the most aborigines. The tactics were unfathomably brutal, and similar to the sorts of vicious dehumanization used at Auschwitz.
Jared Diamond noted that the British "regarded Tasmanians as little more than animals and treated them accordingly. Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included riding out on horseback to shoot them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poison flour where they might find and eat it. Shepherds cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. At a hill christened Mount Victory, settlers slaughtered 30 Tasmanians and threw their bodies over a cliff. One party of police killed 70 Tasmanians and dashed out the children's brains."
See the parallels? Alongside their brutal Rape of Tasmania, the British used similar tactics in their Rape of India. In 1857, the Indian people-- Hindus and Muslims both-- revolted against British oppression, killing thousands of Britons. The British had already been defeated and humiliated in Afghanistan and in Egypt and South America (1805-8), and they feared it was happening again, so they used terror tactics to cow the natives-- similar to what the SS did later. The British burned down whole villages and slaughtered civilians en masse to serve as "examples" to other rebellious towns. Sounds like Lidice, eh? They also tied village elders to cannon openings and blew them apart with the cannons. (Dramatic scenes in many Indian films-- see e.g. Mangal Pandey.)
The British took women, kids and old men in many of the towns and hung them in rows of trees to show how ruthless they could be to the natives. All of this, of course, was rhetorically garbed in classic Victorian insults of the Indian people as inferior, subhuman, not worthy of membership in the community of civilization as defined by the racist British. Then, the British moved toward wholesale genocide. They set fire to many of India's most verdant fields in e.g. Tamil Nadu and around Delhi. They then exported the staple crops and taxed the already desperately poor Indians even further, while manipulating prices to crush indigenous Indian agriculture and industry. The result? 36 million Indians killed in the 1880's and 1890's alone, with tens of millions more in the coming decades.
Even in WWII, Sir Winston Churchill regarded the Indians as sub-human and openly expressed his hatred for them. He translated this hatred into genocide with his rice denial scheme aimed at Bengal, which led to the Bengal Famine and the deaths of 4 million more Indians. That human excrement known as Sir Arthur Bomber Harris got his start with terror-bombing genocides of entire villages in northern India, Iraq and East Africa. It was Harris's wet dream to brutalize as many colonized people as he could since-- in his mind-- they were inferior and not up to the British level of civilization. Harris is roundly hated today, and he deserves every ounce of that spite. We all, of course, know about British genocides against the Irish who-- once again-- were regarded as subhuman. 15-50% of the Indian population was killed by the British in these atrocities, perhaps a similar percentage of the Irish people.
So don't be surprised, Steve, at how successful or brutal the Holocaust was. When official rhetoric demeans people to such an extent, regarding them as outside the range of civilization, the normal constraints on violence break down, and innocents are brutally targeted. The British exemplified this in spades. In Germany, at least, there *were* thousands of people who, despite the brutality of the Gestapo to resisters, stood up against the Nazis to shelter Jews, send them out of the country, or even to assassinate Hitler himself.
Many of my own relatives owe their survival to such German resisters, and some of the big German resistance movements-- e.g. the Stauffenberg Officer resistance, Hugenberg, Dr. Popitz and many of the other anti-Nazi leaders-- were motivated in part by how appalled they were by the Holocaust. There were principled Brits who spoke out against the genocides in Australia, India and especially Ireland, but for the most part British voices were shamefully muted, even in a (relatively) democratic society in the 1800's. And the British, unlike the Germans who've never denied the Nazi past, still ignorantly look with nostalgia on their own Empire during the Victorian period while neglecting to much discuss all the genocides they committed against so many peoples.
M, I am glad to receive such a lengthy comment, but don't have too much to respond.
ReplyDeleteBut briefly: I assume you are based away from Australia, so you may not be aware that the issue of the "extermination" of the Tasmanian aborigines is a matter of much debate here now, especially since a right wing historian Keith Windshuttle wrote a whole book in which (so I believe) he debunks many of the previously accepted versions of massacres and other forms of killing there.
Even before Windshuttle wrote that book, the difference between it and something like the Jewish holocaust was that it was seen as frontier "war" for land use, with the basic "problem" being that the Tasmanian aborigines were fighting back, then hopelessly outdone by guns and other methods. It does not bear much comparison in that sense with the Holocaust, in the same way that the American's treatment of native americans can be seen as very bad, but not of the same nature as the Jewish Holocaust.
As for the British in India, I plead no detailed knowledge of this at all, but (no offence) have great reservations about your description of it. I will need to read more, though.