Who Still Talks of the Armenians?

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

... Hitler was well aware of Turkey's genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the "extermination of the Armenians" had led him to "the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine" over which Aryans would eventually triumph. He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: "Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality," he exclaimed. "Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder.... Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death's Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?" On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey's regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.

A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen's net also caught hundreds of thousands of Communists, Slavs, Romanis, Poles, homosexuals, hospital patients, unarmed prisoners of war, and even orphan children. These two million murders, moreover, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death factories that began in the wake of the invasion.

A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland smuggled out of Warsaw by the Jewish Labor Bund provided remarkably detailed and accurate early documentation of the work of the Einsatzkommandos.

From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using the Ukrainians and Lithuanian fascists for this job. It began in Eastern Galicia in the summer months of 1941. The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place- a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were carried off to an "unknown destination", and killed in the adjacent woods. Thirty thousand Jews were killed in Lwow [Lvov],15,000 in Stanislawow, 5,000 in Tarnopol,2,000 in Zloczow,4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has happened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sambor, Stryj, Drohobycz, Zbaraz, Przemyslany, Kuty, Sniatyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places.... The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.

The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler's government and German society. In January 1942, fourteen senior German government bureaucrats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin, to coordinate efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the "Jewish Question." Officials in charge of the economic exploitation of the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of able-bodied Jews as slave laborers, while Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had pushed for mass execution by the Einsatzgruppen. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees and the extent of terror to wreak upon them.

The Wannsee meeting changed all that. There, SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich enlisted the support of each of the major government ministries and Nazi party organizations in a concerted effort to "clear . . . the German Lebensraum ["living space"] of Jews in a legal way," [emphasis added]. The tactics were relatively simple. "Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East," Heydrich commented. "Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts [i.e.: Nazi-occupied territories on the Eastern Front] for work on roads . . . in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction." All German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the "final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe."

Heydrich's assistant, Adolf Eichmann, estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jews to be "cleaned up" in this fashion he provided a country-by-country breakdown of Jewish populations to help plan tactics. There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.

Heydrich's emphasis on "legality" was crucial to the social psychology of the extermination program and to its functioning on a practical level. For Adolf Eichmann, the Wannsee decisions dispelled his lingering doubts about the propriety of mass murder. "Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich," Eichmann said. "Not only Hitler, not only Heydrich, or [Gestapo chief] Muller, or the SS, or the Party, but the elite of the Civil Service had registered their support.... At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt," Eichmann testified at his later trial for crimes against humanity. "Who was I to judge? Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?"

On an operational level, each German government ministry took responsibility for only part of the overall program-the registration of Jews, the seizure of their property, physical transportation across Europe, and so on-and each part had an easy appearance of legality, of sanction by the state and even of a certain sort of normality. Each act of the extermination program, except for the actual gassing, came complete with a more or less reasonable explanation available to the perpetrators and to the world at large. The government was deporting Jews as a security measure and to put them to work, the story went. This would benefit German society and perhaps even benefit the Jewish deportees (as in the case of aged Jews who were to be sent to a special ghetto at Theresienstadt).

By dividing up responsibility for extermination into explicable, functional parts, the Nazi party and SS enlisted and united the German state and most of German society in the countless little tasks necessary to conduct mass murder. They openly promoted the slogan "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" as a rallying cry in the Nazi-controlled press. Knowledge of the true meaning of the phrase seeped slowly through the informal networks of the governmental, business, and police elites.

Note that even at Wannsee the truth that millions of Jews were to be gassed and shot rather than worked to death was not openly discussed. Almost all of the Jews were said to be "eliminated by natural causes," as Heydrich put it, rather than simply killed. This simple deceit can be traced to the police security surrounding the gassing installations and to the psychological need of most people to evade open complicity in murder.

The SS did not fool German bureaucrats into cooperation. Rather, the Wannsee conference illustrates how Nazi-dominated society created a social consciousness that both facilitated the extermination program and denied its existence. The "legalization" established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination. Many more people knew of (or suspected) the extermination program than could directly acknowledge it, in part because this was a classified government program during wartime. Yet, widespread possession of unofficial or "denied" knowledge became crucial to the success of the extermination effort; without it, the Third Reich would have failed to coordinate its constantly squabbling ministries well enough to carry out the massive effort.

p87
... German industry's unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust. But it is often overlooked in the popular imagination and in media portrayals of Nazi crimes, which tend to stress the role of the political police or the grotesque and horrifying extermination camps.

Forced labor in Germany can be divided into three overlapping categories: press-ganged foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates. Each group is frequently described as slaves or even, as Ben Ferencz has eloquently described Jewish forced laborers, as less than slaves. Still, there were important differences among these categories as far as the laborers themselves were concerned.

The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, though virtually every European nationality was represented. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agricultural labor. "All of the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way that they produce to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure," Labor Minister Sauckel ordered. (Sauckel refers here only to men, but in fact about 25 percent of these workers were female.) As ominous as Sauckel's phrase was, it nevertheless suggested that industry and the German state would make some minimal effort to keep most of these workers alive, if only to use them a bit longer. The workers were often euphemistically referred to as "foreign workers" or even as gostorbeiters-"guest workers."

In contrast, Jewish concentration camp inmates and many Soviet POWs were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them. This procedure typically required between one and six months. The SS, which ran the concentration camps, teetered uneasily between contradictory policies of deriving valuable labor from camp inmates or of simply murdering Jews and other targeted groups as quickly as possible, regardless of the economic consequences. In practice, the police agency pursued both ends simultaneously, selecting some inmates for death-through-labor while immediately killing others wholesale. The prisoners worked to death were primarily Jews, though they were in time joined by groups of Polish and Russian POWs homosexuals, "guest workers" who had attempted to escape from corporate work gangs, and others.

The Germans created a hierarchy among those they declared to be subhuman, and this structure-combined with heavy doses of police terror-contributed to keeping the system of forced labor and mass murder viable for several years. Typically, the Germans sent those at the bottom of the pyramid to be gassed: Jews who were old, weak, or very young; handicapped persons; and injured prisoners. They murdered millions of healthy Jews as well, as part of their Final Solution.

p92
... In the opening years of the war, when the U.S. was still officially neutral, President Franklin Roosevelt had forcefully condemned as a war crime any airborne bombing of undefended cities and towns. Great Britain and the U.S. were signatories to the 1907 Hague convention, Roosevelt said, which had banned "attack or bombardment by any means whatever of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended." The phrase "by any means whatever" had been inserted specifically to deal with bombardments of undefended civilian targets from airplanes or-as had seemed more likely in 1907-from balloons.

U.S. acknowledgment that bombing civilians constituted a war crime disappeared from Allied war propaganda after 1940. Great Britain and Germany began an escalating series of air strikes against one another in which each described its actions as legally sanctioned reprisals intended to deter attacks from the enemy. By the time the U.S. entered the war, the Allies had already concluded that British and U.S. air raids against German cities would remain among their most important tactics. Before World War II was over, both sides had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in this fashion, each blaming the other for initiating the carnage. As the Allies gained control of the skies over Europe, they stopped claiming that these acts of bombing were crimes...

p98

Most ...Western experts had difficulty coming to grips with the growing evidence of Nazi criminality. "It cannot be said that German policy is motivated by any sadistic desire to see other people suffer under German rule," wrote George Kennan in April 1941, when he was chief administrative officer of the U.S. consulate in Berlin. (He wrote this after almost two years of well-publicized pogroms in Poland and mass deportations of German, French, and Dutch Jews to concentration camps.) "Germans are most anxious that their new subjects should be happy in their care; they are willing to make what seems to them important compromises to achieve this result, and they are unable to understand why these measures should not be successful." Kennan was out of step with President Franklin Roosevelt's hard-line policies toward the Nazis, but he was not alone.

The public pattern of Nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal. For them, Germany's forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to problems that were common to U.S. and German elites. They ignored the reports of the Holocaust that had begun to come out of Nazi occupied Europe, and some even went out of their way to discredit | accurate information about what the Nazis were up to.

Splendid Blond Beast

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