Antisemitism versus Racism
Tempest in a Teacup?
How central was antisemitism to the Final Solution? Is this an academically sound question, or is it merely provocative and lacking in substance? Does academic research justify posing this query, or is it essentially motivated by non-scholarly concerns? Does it belong to the ranks of bona fide investigation that calls for modification of prevailing interpretations, or does it belong to that class of flawed and/or anti-intellectual ploys employed by "revisionists"? How serious is one to take a debate predicated on the proposition that antisemitism was not the primary force behind the Final Solution? Should it be tested and accorded professional respect or dismissed out of hand as lying outside the parameters of serious discussion?
Indeed why bring it up at all? Is the fact that it was bitterly debated during the recent 18th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Montreal and later commented upon by several prominent Holocaust experts sufficient reason to comment on it? According to Professor Henry Friedlander (Brooklyn College, NY), the extermination of the Jews, if seen alongside other Nazi genocidal projects, is more a product of a racist-inspired policy than one fueled by antisemitism. "The fixation on antisemitism is misplaced," Friedlander concluded. His infelicitous choice of words notwithstanding, the point must be well-taken, if only because the Holocaust makes little sense in isolation and only becomes intelligible once perceived in conjunction with contemporary events. (See The Genocide Forum I/1)
Traditional (Christian and post- Enlightenment social) antisemitisms underwent a radical metamorphosis at the end of the 19th century. Heretofore, antijudaism had rested on a complex but shifting bed of theological, philosophical, political, economic, and social rationales. Judeophobia, in all its manifestations, including the extreme tendency by clerics to demonize the Jew, never crystallized sufficiently to become truly genocidal. Traditional antisemitism, however lethal, never went beyond large-scale pogroms and unsustained massacres, and was always offset and often neutralized by more moderate elements in society. Over the centuries, there were always allies or alternatives for Jewish communities under siege. At worst — mass expulsion — always led to residence in a new host country.
It was not till the advent of Darwinism and nationalism that race, as a social vehicle for group survival, laid the foundations for racist antisemitism. Once wedded to one another — existential racism and virulent antisemitism — the conceptual basis for systematic genocidal thought and action was laid, and, with effective demagogy and militant rhetoric, traditional antisemitism could be mobilized and freed from its inherent inhibiting limitations. Extermination in the racist antisemitic train of thought became a logical conclusion, indeed, according to National Socialist reasoning, a moral imperative. Spencerian Darwinism coupled to volkish nationalism transformed traditional antisemitism into a variant of militant racism.
If that is the case, then the argument over the primacy of antisemitism as against the primacy of racism becomes moot. The Final Solution would have been impossible without one of them. Racism without a modifier of antisemitism which classifies Jews as a race would have targeted another people, but not the Jews. Antisemitism without racism would have remained within the traditional outer boundaries of persecution short of genocide.
The Montreal "debate," therefore, was unfortunate, misplaced, and misstated. It was more an unscheduled, improvised exchange of emotions rather than a carefully prepared dialogue between detached scholars. At best, it was a less than useful side-show that attracted brief but unnecessary media attention, including from The Chronicle of Higher Education and in the Letters to the Editor section of The New York Times.
The overall impression of this "debate" is that it sadly resembles the utterly diverting and equally overrated dispute over the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust. Just as some believe, falsely, even hysterically, that comparison of the Holocaust to other genocides threatens to trivialize it; so are there those who fear that any questioning of antisemitism as the sole or core instigating force behind the decision to annihilate European Jewry will somehow diminish its significance and, thereby, put into question the status of the Jews as the principal victims of the Third Reich. These, at best, are expressions of parochial, special interests squabbles that contribute little towards further understanding, generating much heat and too little light.
The immediate "culprit" for this latest storm in a teacup is Professor Friedlander. In his The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, a superbly researched study, he commits a much too common leap of logic often made by historians, namely, that what happens prior to an event has a causal relationship to what follows; that is, the Nazi euthanasia program was a substantial prelude to the mass-killing of Jews. That simply is not true. Euthanasia has been and remains a policy and practice in several societies and has, so far, never led to genocide. However, having made his non sequitur connection, Friedlander further reasons fallaciously that since racism was uppermost in the National Socialist scheme, it supplanted antisemitism as the leading raison d'explication for the Final Solution. This led him to his present flawed conclusion demoting the role of antisemitism. (More on that in a future essay.)
Henry R. Huttenbach
Posing Difficult Questions
Christian-Jewish relations, historically rarely cordial, began to assume an aura of civility with the secularization of society in the 18th century. A degree of mutual respect was even achieved in some of the more democratic countries during the 19th century. The price of the Holocaust, the genocide of Jews in the midst of Christian-populated Europe, significantly set back the clock. Old fears, new suspicions, deep guilt and bitter resentments created a gulf between the two religious communities. Since then, half a century of painstaking dialogue has managed to restore some degree of mutual understanding and made possible a measure of sincere reconciliation. Nevertheless, painful questions remain, in this instance questions for Catholics.
The prominent role of Catholics in the Nazi regime needs to be fully examined. It is not enough to dub them as sinners. The facts speak otherwise. Both Bavaria and Austria provided a disproportionate percentage of rank and file Nazi party and SS members. In the upper echelons of both were practicing Catholics. Hitler himself was nominally a Catholic. Throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich, during the years of the Final Solution, Catholics were among the architects and managers of the program to exterminate Jews by all means possible. Meanwhile they continued to pray in and benefit from church services, openly celebrating Christian holy Days: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and Ascension Day. In other words, they remained fully accepted congregants, denied no sacraments.
How was this possible? In the eyes of the Church leadership were there no mortal sins being committed? Was there no sacrilegious act, no defamation of God's name, no violation of the spirit of Christianity, of Roman Catholicism? Why was Hitler not excommunicated? The medieval papacy was able to bring an emperor to his knees at Canossa. So what higher priority justified not taking this symbolic act? Fear of communism?
If Auschwitz is an insufficient moral crime to warrant condemnation, then what is sufficiently sinful? What are the parameters of condoned and condemned ethical and unethical behavior? Are they so flexible as to make the death camps and the concentration camps fall within the boundaries of the forgivable? Does it "just" require a visit to one's confessor to absolve an SS guard of the brutalities he committed that past week in Dachau? Can a forty-hour stint in Sobibor be "forgiven" with a three minute confession, a dozen Hail Marys and participation in the sacrament of the mass? There is more here than temporary moral dysfunction: there is, for example, the issue of Christian anti-Judaism and moral church teaching and practice.
Much toward erasing the latter has been done, but all too little about confronting the former theologically. The central question that must be forthrightly asked is one of doctrine: can there be Christianity without the defamation of Jews and their faith? What is left if (were it theoretically possible) one excised all negative references to Jews and Judaism from the four Gospels and from the Epistles of St Paul? What kind of a non-Jewish doctrine would there be left? What more than a re-confirmation of the Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh) would one be left with? Is not some kind of attack on the permanence and immutability of the Jewish Covenant necessary to establish the validity of Christianity, not just as another religion or as a primus inter pares, but as a successor religion? Is not some kind of delegitimization of Jews and Judaism required?
Another set of questions, not all original from this pen (word processor): if the Final Solution implies Church culpability in a sin of monstrous proportions, in part by significant acts of commission and omission, how does the Church find its way back on the track of redemption? Reference to God's "infinite mercy" is a false escape hatch and potentially too self-congratulatory and self-serving. Why should God forgive an institution for such an irrevocable betrayal of the quintessence of Jesus' humanitarian teachings? Why should He not withdraw (if He ever extended) His New Covenant with the Gentiles and restore exclusively His contract with His historic chosen ones? Jews have correctly asked in anguish: "Where was God in Auschwitz?" Catholics must ask in despair "Where is God after Auschwitz?" Is He still with a church that had demonstrated abject moral paralysis?
It was Elie Wiesel who hinted somewhat hyperbolically that Christianity died at Auschwitz; perhaps it would be more accurate to state "the Church lost its soul during the Final Solution." If not, then why not? What redeeming high ground does it claim to stand on that would persuade its Jewish founder?
An early sign of Church rigor mortis (perhaps the defining moment of no return) happened during Kristallnacht, on November 9-10, 1938. Though responding with post facto muted statements of regret, not a single church leader and theologian recognized at the time (or was able to alter Church perception to the effect) that the Nazi Pogrom had been a direct attack on Christians and not just on Jews. None noted that the burning of the Torah scrolls was setting the Five Books of Moses ablaze. All associated the Chumash with Jews, with "their" Bible, none with Christianity's Old Testament! The cataractic eyes of the entire hierarchy failed to see an obvious sacrilege, even when it was committed hundreds of times over in a 36-hour reign of terror throughout Germany and annexed Austria. Among the arsonists were Catholics, future architects and guards of ghettoes and concentration camps, most of them practicing Church members. The shrillest of them all was that "embodiment" of family values Joseph Goebbels, a notorious womanizer, but also a major contributor to the brutal language of antisemitism and the rhetoric of mass extermination, of genocide. Never once was this voice of murder rebuked or chastised by the Church custodians of humanistic morality, never once denied the spiritual consolation of the sacraments. When he committed mass murder/suicide of himself and his family, he was still a member of the Church. How was this possible? And why?
These are hard and harsh questions. But a genuine Jewish-Christian rapprochement cannot take place unless they are posed unambiguously, demanding straight answers that are free from camouflage. Redemption cannot take place without facing unflinchingly the unvarnished truth embedded in the past. Is that too much to ask? Institutions that have failed to do so remain shells, empty vessels, devoid of a raison d'être other than naked survival. But if that had always been the case, there never would have been any martyrs, those with sufficient faith.
Vatican II's rejection of collective guilt in the present for the death of Jesus but implied Jewish responsibility of His contemporaries, recognition of Israel but not of Jerusalem, and a liturgy somewhat purged of the worst defamation of Jews skirt the hard questions and their answers. The terrible decade of Church-Nazi German coexistence will not go away; its negative repercussions will persist until there is full acknowledgement free of euphemisms. Ironically the legacy of the Final Solution weighs far more heavily on the collective shoulders of the Church than it does on the entire Jewish people. There is a painful irony here but also an opportunity to metamorphose that suffering into spiritual renewal. In retrospect the crisis of the Holocaust may be more critical than that once posed by Martin Luther nearly five centuries ago, a crisis that sadly deepened the gulf between Jews and Christians
Henry R. Huttenbach
Rwanda and the Church: A Footnote
The utter incapacity of the Catholic Church to play a civilizing role in the Hutu massacres of Tutsis two years ago was duly noted in The Genocide Forum No 3. Since then the complicity of several priests, in not only failing to provide safe haven but in actively identifying Tutsis for Hutu deaths squads, has been reported in The New York Times, July 7, 1995 (A3). Worse, one of the major collaborators was secretly smuggled out of a refugee camp in Zaire and, with the Vatican's participation, hidden in France. The priest has since been apprehended and is being brought to trial by the French authorities.
What makes the whole affair particularly onerous is the unrepentant, stiff-necked stance of Vatican officials in this criminal and egregiously immoral matter. In the face of the exposé of this entire affair by the London-based African Rights, the Vatican has been depressingly stubborn, combining silence, damage control, and outright denial. On one occasion, a Vatican spokesman said of Church policy: "We do not comment on these matters." On another, the Reverend Ciro Benedettini was quoted as saying, "I am sorry, we have nothing to say about this."
It is a silence with roots going back to the immediate post-World War II days when thousands of former SS and other Nazi functionaries received the Vatican's assistance to flee Europe. Most were given diplomatic papers, false identities, and even bogus clerical titles to ease their passage to Latin America. Thus, just as genocidists, were then given the protection of the Church, so it seems do those implicated in mass murder obtain its covert protection today. Is this a symptom of a long-standing policy?
As the present pope spreads the spirit of ecumenism globally, one wonders to what extent he knows or is credibly unaware of the Vatican connection to the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda.
Henry R. Huttenbach
A World Otherwise Engaged: Jan Karski's Mission Impossible
If a gentile hero is necessary, then the unqualified honor should go to Jan Karski and not to the one-dimensional, hollow persona that was Oscar Schindler. Here was a man who risked all to inform the world that Europe's Jews were suffering mass extermination in Poland at the hands of the occupying Germans, and no one in power heeded him.
It was 1942 when Karski, as an emissary of the non-communist Polish underground, sought, in vain, to alert the highest authorities in England and the United States to the Nazi program of annihilation then in full swing. It is an adventure he once recorded in 1944 in his poignant Story of a Secret State, one that has now been retold in a first-rate scholarly manner in Karski : How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislas M. Jankowski (John Wiley and Sons, 1995). It is a book all teachers of the period should read, if only for one reason: the impregnable wall of indifference and disbelief encountered by Karski. Wherever he went, London and Washington, he told his tale of horror to presidents and ministers,and to high government officials who, to a man, failed to comprehend his message and/or seemed disinterested. And therein lies the double tragedy of the Holocaust: its low priority in the minds of those conducting the war against Hitler; and the dreadful impotence of Jews outside Nazi occupied Europe, powerless to alter this fatal strategy of the Allies, which literally condemned all Jews under German control to death until war's end.
It is not that Karski was simply a messenger of terrible news never heard before. It is not that he was just reporting what others had told him. It is that Karski was an eyewitness ! Twice he had clandestinely entered the Warsaw Ghetto, there to witness the fact of mass starvation; and once, in the guise of a Ukrainian guard, Karski smuggled himself into a death camp, there to see for himself the still nameless act of genocide (a word not coined till 1944). Three times Karski had risked his life for Jews, not to mention for Poland as its secret courier. But none of these qualifications were enough to break down the political and psychological resistance of those who heard him but did not listen.
He spoke to Anthony Eden, England's Foreign minister, who met him with glacial formality. How was young Karski to know that Eden looked upon the slaughter of Jews as a convenient resolution of Britain's post-war problem in the near East? Their slaughter would decrease what might have been the clamor of millions of Jews seeking to enter British Mandate Palestine, a territory the English had effectively closed to further Jewish immigration with their pre-war White Paper.
He spoke to President Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt who, typically, greeted him cordially but was determined to make little more than a token gesture: Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board, a next-to-useless instrument of rescue under the circumstances.
And Karski spoke to prominent Jews: but Justice Felix Frankfurter, a crusty skeptical man, frankly admitted his inability to believe the news form Europe — to do otherwise, one speculates, would have shattered his optimistic understanding of human nature. Only Szmul Zygielbojm in London did believe Karski; but, on hearing the world's implacable silence, committed suicide in the hopes that the shock of his act of self-destruction would overcome the abysmal lack of response. His death, however, was in vain, and Karski, in despair, came close to emulating him.
Instead, Karski chose to live and fight on, also in vain, until the end of the war. Thereafter, Karski elected his own brand of silence, vowing never to speak of his futile missions, a vow he kept for thirty years. Then in the mid-seventies, he began to lecture, mainly to Jewish audiences, who hold him in high esteem as one of the few who cared enough to risk all.
Jan Karski ranks with the Wallenbergs and Bernadottes, those who actively intervened in the Holocaust and actually saved lives at enormous risk to their own. Karski belongs in that pantheon of Holocaust heroes alongside the German businessman who repeatedly brought news of the Final Solution to Switzerland. These were men of stature, of high character, and of great courage, due to a common basic faith in decency. They were giants whose brave actions remind us that not all meekly accepted Hitler's reign of depravity, not all forgot to uphold the sanctity of human life, including that of Jews.
If only there had been more of them, if only they had not been exceptions; how different the chapter of the Holocaust and its aftermath might have been. A critical number of the morally upright would perhaps have broken through the twin barriers of indifference and apathy, and of incredulity and despair. Though there were ample witnesses, only Karski dared step into the line of fire. Some, like Wallenberg, died cruelly at the hands of the KGB (but not before the Jews of Budapest were saved).
Why were there so few? That is the cardinal question. An insufficient number of Karskis allowed the behemoth of genocide to operate. Quite simply, European society, beginning with Germany's, could not summon enough opposition to genocide until it was too late. Can this also be said of today's democratic societies? Teachers of the Holocaust might do well to ponder whether the informed mind translates immediately into an informed heart? Karski's was a mission impossible in a world otherwise engaged, would he have been received better today when we live in the shadows of Chechnya and Rwanda?
Henry R. Huttenbach