Holocaust Memorial Day is marked each year on 27 January – the anniversary of the date of the liberation of Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Attempts to explain the Nazi Genocide remain the subject of heated debate from several opposing perspectives. Gary Fraser believes that an analysis of modernity, combined with Foucault’s analysis of discourse applied to science, offer a basis for a deeper understanding of the Holocaust as well as its continuing legacy.

The Holocaust and the dark underbelly of modernity.

The belief that Western society was in a process of continual progress dominated the ideas of the European Enlightenment. From this perspective history was understood as linear and, in the final analysis, progressive. This line of thought strongly influenced the dominant philosophies of the period including early Marxism. The arrival of the First World War challenged the idea that society inevitably evolved along a progressive route. The Second World War and the Holocaust should have killed it off altogether. However, ideas have a tendency to persist in the face of contradictory evidence. If European society in this period was developing from barbarity to civilisation, then how do we explain the Holocaust? Traditional historians have answered the question by locating the Holocaust as a deviation, albeit a major one, from European history’s hitherto progressive path.

The historical, cultural, political and economic context which constitutes the European Enlightenment can be identified as modernity.  Capitalism and socialism, the development of science, and the decline of religion as a ruling force in Europe are all part of modernity.

The Holocaust has been characterised in conventional historical terms as being the bastard offspring of modernity, utterly contrary to a society based on reason, science and rationality. The Nazis are generally regarded as a throwback to a primitive form of society and humanity; and the Holocaust an emotion-driven response of an entire nation who, under the spell of a charismatic helmsman, had committed the act of genocide. If only reason and rationality had prevailed such barbarism would not have occurred.

Scientific discourses

The triumph of science over religion, of reason and rationality over superstition and mysticism is a key factor determining the era of modernity. Scientific conquest has opened up new frontiers and extended the consciousness of what it means to be human. Scientists are the real revolutionaries in any society.  The accomplishments of science are beyond doubt but, looked at dialectically, the discourse of science has not only challenged old prejudices and practices but has actively replaced them and created new ones.

Scientific facts are independently and concretely true but scientific discourses do not exist independent of politics and ideology. For Foucault, the point of analysing discourses is not to pronounce on what forms of knowledge are true or false but to study how certain discourses become authoritative. Social scientists often draw upon the language and practices of the natural sciences to illuminate their theories. Engels proudly proclaimed that Marx and Darwin were the two most important 19th century thinkers, since Darwin had discovered the universal laws that govern nature, and Marx, according to Engels, had discovered similar laws that govern history and economics. Early followers of Marxism regarded it as superior to other forms of socialism on the premise that the Marxist version of socialism was scientific.

In the same period right wing ideologies immersed themselves within the cloak of science. The language and imagery of Darwinism was borrowed (and misused) to explain capitalist social relations as inherently natural. Moreover, elements of this ‘Social’ Darwinism evolved into scientific racism and the eugenics movement, both of them powerful discourses informing far right ideologies across much of Europe.

The language and imagery of science - however ‘pseudo-scientific’ in reality has often been used as a weapon in the oppression of particular groups. The advent of modern scientific discourses coincided with vicious witch-hunts across much of Europe. The new discourses of science informed by a strict positivism began the process of constructing the modern form of ‘reason’ - at first in a religious guise. It could be argued that ‘Witches’ were among the first casualties in the new rationalism’s persecution of the ‘irrational’. In later centuries the ‘homosexual’, the ‘madman’, the ‘criminally insane’ and the ‘vagabond’ would join the list. The term ‘homosexual’ was created by medical men who used it as a reference to a pathologically deviant form of sexuality. The ‘madman’s’ departure from ‘rationality’ would justify him being locked away and institutionalised. All of these categories were persecuted by a rationalism which paraded itself as scientific. Included in this list is the construct of the ‘Jew’. 

Jew as social construct

The Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg discusses three versions of anti-semitism –religious, economic and scientific. Religious anti-semitism begins with Christianity’s ghettoisation of the Jews. In medieval Christian doctrine Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. When armies of the First Crusade set out to rescue the holy places of Christianity from Arab conquerors, they slaughtered thousands of Jews along the way. With the arrival of the Enlightenment and the move towards a more secularised Europe, anti-semitism takes on new forms. At the dawn of the new bourgeois era the Jews are persecuted for economic reasons. In literature the stereotypical Jew is always a moneylender. The final stage in the history of anti-semitism is scientific. The discourse of science now takes centre stage in the persecution of Jews. Identified as an inferior race, the Jewish people are discussed as a disease threatening to engulf civilised society.

Taking the three strands of historical anti-semitism together, Hilberg concludes that the ‘Nazis did not discard the past they built on it’. The language of modern racism is intrinsically interwoven with the vocabulary of science. For example, the metaphors of modern medicine are used to illuminate racist discourses. The discourse of modern medicine has created a dualism between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘disease ridden’ body.  Bauman notes that the purpose of medicine is to separate useful elements destined to live and thrive, from harmful and morbid ones, which ought to be exterminated. Consequently, a central theme of modern medicine is its model of health and normality coupled with a strategy of separation and the technique of surgery. Early schools of functionalist sociology compared society to the human body, and drew upon this dualism created by modern medicine. Bauman concludes that it is difficult to think of genocide without the entrenched metaphors of modern medicine. He argues that the exterminatory version of anti-semitism was a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

The speeches of leading Nazis, such as Hitler or Goebbels, confirm the relation between anti-semitism and pathology: the Jews are consistently portrayed as a disease or compared to vermin. The healthy body, in this case the German nation, is under attack from an inside invader. The Jew according to Nazi ideology is a cancerous growth on society requiring elimination.      

The Nazi regime, far from being backward or primitive, prided itself on its scientific demeanour. German universities, like their European counterparts, were committed to the scientific method of positivism. Strict positivists regard science as a value free activity whereby reason is emancipated from emotion and moral judgement. Taken to one extreme, strict positivism leads to Doctor Mengele’s laboratory in Auschwitz where he carried out brutal experiments: placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them and in some cases freezing people to death. He performed many unnecessary amputations and even attempted to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes. Mengele’s eagerness to understand genetics knew no limits. Children were killed in order to study their corpses. He was particularly interested in twins, which he killed at exactly the same time as a way of expanding genetic knowledge which he hoped would scientifically verify Nazi racist doctrines. Mengele regarded his research as unique, for only in a Nazi death camp would you be able to conduct an experiment that involved killing twins at exactly the same time.

The Nazis were early converts to scientific racism and eugenics.  Though such ‘scientific’ ideas have been thoroughly discredited by modern biology, the eugenics movement of the early part of the twentieth century asserted that society should discourage breeding by those of its members who were unfit physically, mentally and socially. When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws shortly after coming to power, they outlawed Jews from having relations with non-Jews. These laws and the beginning of a state-sponsored persecution of an entire people were drafted by university-educated experts who regarded themselves as scientific and demonstrating reason and rationality. The concept of the Holocaust, as Bauman notes, was born and executed in our own rational society, at the high point of our civilisation and at the peak of human cultural achievement.

Murdered by bureaucracy

The nation state with its vast bureaucratic apparatuses is a historical feature of modernity. It is perhaps impossible to truly understand the Holocaust without an insight into the role played by bureaucracy and bureaucrats. Primitive human emotions like rage and fury, resentment and hatred are ineffective in carrying out a killing programme on the scale of the Holocaust. The emotion-led lynch mob will tire before the genocide is complete. The manic obsessions of Hitler and leading Nazis, although crucial, are not the determining factor in the completion of mass murder. Only a modern nation state with a vast bureaucracy can commit murder on such a scale.

By highlighting the role of bureaucracy we gain an insight into the psychology of those responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution. Bauman notes that racism is a policy first and ideology second. Like all forms of politics, racism requires organisation and structure, securing employment for a layer of managers and experts. In his landmark study, Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning discusses the ways in which modern bureaucratic methods are pivotal in the organisation of an event like genocide:

‘Modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim.’

Bureaucratic culture creates docile servants capable of implementing directives from above. In his memoirs Albert Speer, who was Germany’s armaments minister during the war, wrote:

‘Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership, men who could think and act independently. The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men. The means of communication enable it to mechanise the work of the lower leadership. Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.’

Applying the logic of reason and rationality, dividing the world into inputs and outputs and equipped with a conception of society as an administrative empire to be controlled, the bureaucrat is a far more competent killer than the emotion-led lynch mob. Bureaucrats become dehumanised and are capable of being involved in the killing process without the psychological burden of killing. As Hilberg states:

‘Most of the participants of genocide did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers…most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blue prints, talked on the telephone and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks.’

Bureaucracy dehumanises through manipulating language. The subject is only ever expressed in purely, technical and ethically neutral terms. This neutrality performs a normalising function in the implementation of genocide. In her study of the Eichman trial, Hannah Arendt notes that the mass extermination of European Jewry is never referred to as ‘killing’, or ‘murder’. Instead we find terms like the ‘Final Solution’. The deportation of the Jews from the Ghettos to the killing centres of Auschwitz and Treblinka are known as ‘resettlement programmes’ or ‘evacuations’. In official memoranda the Jews receive ‘special treatment’, never are they ‘gassed’.    

Industrialists and Nazis

The unique and striking feature of the Holocaust was the way in which it was industrialised. According to Bauman:

‘Auschwitz was a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts. The chimneys the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh.’

The industrialisation of the killing process created a physical distancing between perpetrator and victim and the killing could be carried out on an economically efficient mass scale.

Industrialists in Germany were keen supporters of the Nazis. By eliminating the corrupt elite of the former Weimar Republic, Hitler and the Nazis rescued German capitalism. For the industrialists, Nazism was a price worth paying if it meant the elimination of the Communist threat. Leon Trotsky argued that by expropriating the bourgeoisie politically, Hitler had managed to save it economically. In destroying the trade union movement, Hitler made Germany safe and secure for capitalism.

German industry benefited enormously from the Holocaust. In the early days of the Third Reich, German companies colluded with the Nazi state in the forced purchase of Jewish businesses. Unlike Oscar Schindler, portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, most German businessmen were completely unheroic and were motivated by blatant opportunism and greed. German ‘entrepreneurs’ received their share in the spoils of the war and were eager participants in the massive plunder of the companies of Nazi-occupied-Europe. German multinationals benefited from the Nazis persecution of Jewish, Soviet, Polish and Slav prisoners of war. German car companies such as BMW and Volkswagen employed slave labour and have only recently paid compensation for the crimes they committed during the Nazi era. IG Farben profited from the slave labour of Auschwitz prisoners, and its subsidiaries were involved in the production and development of Zyklon B gas.

The role of anti-semitism

Two questions emerge when trying to understand the role of anti-semitism in the Holocaust. Firstly, to what extent was anti-semitism a key factor in the popular consciousness of ordinary Germans? And secondly, how big a role did anti-semitism play in support for Hitler and the Nazi regime?  Scholars have been divided into two camps: ‘Intentionalists’ and ‘Functionalists’. The first camp, a view promoted by Zionists and successive Israeli governments, insists that the Holocaust was conceived the moment the Nazis took power and implies that the extermination of the Jews was the prime factor in Nazi ideology since the party was formed in the early 1920s. From this perspective, the road to Auschwitz was paved at the dawn of the Third Reich. The ‘intentionalists’ locate anti-semitism as a key factor in popular support for the Nazis during their reign of power.

In contrast to the ‘intentionalist’ discourse ‘Functionalists’ talk of a ‘twisted road’ that leads to genocide. Attention is given to forces both inside and outside Germany rather than portraying the Holocaust as a uniquely German experience. There were many among the armies, police forces and administrative departments of occupied nations who collaborated keenly with the Nazis. Furthermore, research has challenged the claim that militant anti-semitism was widespread in Hitler’s Germany. Bauman says:

‘There is a growing consensus among historians of the Nazi era that the perpetration of the Holocaust required the neutralisation of ordinary German attitudes towards the Jews not their mobilisation.’

This is a challenging but pivotal point. The annihilation of Jews was carried out by the institutional apparatuses of a modern state and not by a fanatical population. The only major attempt by the Nazis to galvanise popular anti-semitism was in the events of Kristallnacht. This was a pogrom that consisted of the destruction of Jewish businesses and an attempt to terrorise the Jewish population. Browning notes that the event produced a negative response among many Germans. Kristallnacht was carried out by the old guard, the Brownshirts (SA), and lumpen elements in the Nazi Party. Most Germans played the role of bystanders. Bauman believes the sight of murder and destruction put off as many as it inspired. Leading Nazis despised the primitive anti-semitism of the SA and the old guard, which they regarded as backward. Hitler thought that his version of anti-semitism was modern and based on reason and logic.

In one of his first writings on the ‘Jewish Question’ in 1919, Hitler distinguished anti-semitism of ‘emotion’ from the modern anti-semitism of ‘reason’ and ‘science’. The former, Hitler argued, would only give rise to temporary eruptions or pogroms whilst the latter would herald a series of legal measures aimed at the eventual elimination of the Jews. This thoroughly modern version of anti-semitism dominated life in the Third Reich. It meant that the ‘Jewish Question’ was one for functionaries and experts of the state and not really a major concern for the German community. Modern persecution of the Jews required the distancing of violence from the populace. Subsequently anti-semitism in Germany was passive rather than active.

Bauman comments:

‘most people probably thought little and asked less about what was happening to the Jews… the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.’

Sociological approach

Attempts to understand the Holocaust in terms of individual psychology have proved futile and ultimately reactionary. Initial studies of the Nazi genocide interpreted it as an outrage committed by born criminals, sadists, madmen or otherwise morally deficient individuals. According to established orthodoxy, the perpetrators were thoroughly wicked and incorrigible. Such accounts, which have dominated popular consciousness, do not stand up to close scrutiny. When probed deeper the experiences of the Third Reich are far more disturbing. Psychologists interviewing members of the SS after the war concluded that fewer than 10% could be described as ‘abnormal’:

Their cruelty was social in origin rather than a product of individual psychology. A sociological approach to the Holocaust reveals the extent of the crimes that individuals were prepared to commit within an authoritarian command system. It is within these command systems such as the army, the police force or the bureaucratic departments of a modern nation state, that individual morality is moulded and shaped.

Modernity gave birth to a new rationalism whose highest achievements were scientific endeavour and the extension of democracy. In the process, the overall framework of modernity challenged religion and the delusions which constitute most religious ideas. Despite its achievements, though, this first modernity possessed a dark underbelly which proved as brutal and oppressive as any previous epoch. Modernity provided new victims to persecute and modern subjects to oppress.  The towering achievement of modernity’s underbelly was the Holocaust.

The Holocaust helps us to better understand the human condition. It illuminates what we as a species are capable of. One of Marx’s favourite aphorisms was ‘nothing human is alien to me’. Using this as a starting point we can begin to understand the actions of ‘educated’ and ‘rational’ people who participated in humanity’s worst crime.

For Marxists wishing to transform society we have to understand the ways in which hierarchal regimes reproduce themselves in each of their citizens. Consciousness is produced and reproduced in our lived realities. That is why hierarchal command systems, which are a dominating feature of the modern state, need to be analysed and understood.  Only when we understand how such regimes are reproduced within the psychic structures of the individual will we be truly in a position to supersede them with a new mode of organisation. Perhaps one of the main lessons of the Holocaust and the experiences of the Third Reich in general, in the words of an unknown Holocaust survivor, is that we should fear the person who obeys the law more than the one who breaks it. 

Gary Fraser.  (this article was first published in a slightly different form in the magazine Jewish Socialist, April 2007)

Useful reading

Arendt, H, (1963), Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Books, New York, US

Bauman, Z, (1989), Modernity and the Holocaust, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK

Bresheeth, H, Hood, S and Jansz, L, (2000), Introducing the Holocaust, Icon Books, Cambridge, UK

Browning, C, (1992), Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Penguin Books, London, UK

Hilberg, R, (1992) Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, Harper Collins, New York, US

Speer, A, (1970), Inside the Third Reich, New York, US