A Numerus Clausus
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ?
Museum . . . all of the Nazis' victims are included and respected," states Michael Berenbaum in The World Must Know, the museum's official supplement. Miles Lerman, chair of the governing council of the Memorial Museum, echoed the ecumenical promise in a l995 fundraising letter in which he wrote of the "challenge . . . to remember and immortalize the six million Jews and millions of others who died in the Holocaust. People who in their darkest moments feared not so much their own deaths, but that they would be forgotten." Regrettably, the Memorial Museum, rather than "including and respecting" the "millions of others," minimizes non-Jewish deaths.
It is generally accepted that the Nazis killed directly and indirectly nearly six million Jews and more than three million Soviet prisoners of war. And most historians would agree that Polish non- Jewish civilian deaths at Nazi hands were well over two million.
The total memorialization the museum grants to the three million murdered Soviet P.O.Ws. consists of, toward the middle of the permanent exhibition, a shocking picture of five emaciated Soviet P.O.W.s, a video, and a panel entitled "Invasion of the Soviet Union." The panel refers to Stalin's ignoring warnings of Nazi intentions and to the Nazi view that Judaism and Communism were two aspects of the same vice; and, in its sole reference to the fate of Soviet soldiers, states that "hundreds of thousands were captured or killed." The period referred to by this phrase is unclear. An uninformed museum visitor reading this display would assume that the "hundreds of thousands" referred to Soviet losses during the entire period of uninterrupted German military success and advance, that is, from June 22, l941, to the halting of the German advance in front of Moscow in late November, 1941. Close to four million Soviet soldiers were captured or killed in those twenty three weeks.
The phrase "hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were captured or killed" appears in The World Must Know (p. 94), again with an ambiguous reference. In response to a query, Berenbaum replied that the reference was to one month only, the month of September. In September 1941 during the battle for Kiev, about 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured or killed. The choice to represent well over half a million by the words "hundreds of thousands" in a book which generally uses precise figures is a choice to obscure and minimize the enormity of Soviet losses. But since the "hundreds of thousands" phrase will be understood by most readers to refer not to one month of the German invasion but to the whole campaign period, the conveyed impression of Soviet losses is one tenth of the actual losses.
Polish Gentile deaths are also misrepresented by the Memorial Museum and The World Must Know in a multifaceted manner rather than by a simple misrepresentation of the numbers killed. Entering the museum galleries, a visitor is confronted with footage and photographs of concentration camps taken by US. Army cameramen in April l945, and then passes through rooms detailing Nazi persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, and Roma (Gypsies); next, in a corridor, one comes upon three display panels. This display is the sole memorialization in the galleries of Polish Gentile victims.
The central panel entitled "Terror in Poland," reads in part: ". . . Native Polish populations. . . [were expelled] from entire regions . . . [the Nazi intention was to] destroy Polish culture . . . thousands of Polish politicians, teachers, university professors, and priests were executed or sent to concentration camps." (my emphasis) To the right of this panel are nine photographs of executions, of bodies, and of individuals who were executed. All of the photographs are dated l939 or l940, creating an impression that Nazi terror aimed at Gentile Poland wound down after 1940. The average number of Poles in the individual photographs is under ten. There are no photographs of mass executions, of mass graves. The misleading statement of the main panel that (only) "thousands . . . were executed or sent to concentration camps" is thus reinforced.
Absent from the three Polish panels is a mention of Warsaw. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising l50,000 civilians were killed (including several thousand Jews in hiding). After the uprising the Germans razed most of what was left of Warsaw, expelled 500,000 people, conscripted 100,000 for forced labor, and sent 65,000 to concentration camps. The museum gives significant space to the l943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an uprising that involved and affected many fewer people than the unmentioned Warsaw Uprising. (About as many people were killed in the Warsaw Uprising as were killed by the atomic bombings of Japan.)
The World Must Know mirrors the Memorial Museum in obscuring and minimizing Nazi killing of non-Jewish Poles. A section entitled "Terror in Poland" (pp. 62-63) states that Poles were considered Untermenschen, and quotes Hitler's 1939 prediction that the murder of "men, women, and children of Polish extraction" will be forgotten by future generations, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians ?" The section also indicates that death, forced Aryanization of kidnapped Polish children, and resettlement were part of the Polish Gentile experience under Nazi rule. However, without the figures of forced resettlement (over a million and a half), child kidnappings (over 30,000), and executions (over a million), or mention of the fate of Warsaw, the victimization of Gentile Poles is inadequately remembered.
The World Must Know has two references to Polish non-Jewish deaths in a section entitled "Killing Centers." Neither reference is indexed, though more than ten percent of the text is indexed under the term "Poland" — a first layer of obscurity for the Polish dead of the camps. One reference reads: "Tens of thousands of Poles, nineteen thousand Gypsies, and twelve thousand Soviet prisoners of war were also among those who were slaughtered at Birkenau" (124). Note the precise numbers for non-Polish dead in contrast to the vague approximation for Polish victimization. A statement that at least seventy five thousand Polish Gentiles were murdered at Auschwitz/Birkenau would be made and indexed in a book that included all of the Nazis' victims.
A second "Killing Centers" reference reads: ". . . Majdanek. According to Polish sources about 360,000 — more than 60 percent, many of them Poles — died from starvation, execution, disease, and beatings. Seven gas chambers were employed . . ." (my italics, p. 124). Note the "according to Polish sources." Nowhere in the text is the phrase used "according to Jewish (German, Soviet) sources." Note the "many of them Poles." Surely the Polish sources give a figure of Polish dead. And note that Poles " died from starvation, execution . . ." In the text Jews were murdered at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Only at Majdanek did people die, 360,000 people, "many of them Poles."
In a museum memorializing primarily Jewish dead, Hillel's definition of Judaism could be usefully remembered: "Do not do unto others what would be hateful to yourself." Prominent Jews, including members of the museum's governing board, have forcefully protested Polish failure to memorialize the murder of Jews separately from the murder of Polish citizens. A more Jewish museum in Hillel's sense of Jewish would be careful to fully honor the Nazis' Polish Gentile victims.
"Not doing to others what would be hateful to yourself" is not just a religious ideal, it is practical advice. By misrepresenting Polish Gentile and Soviet P.O.W.s deaths, the Memorial Museum leaves itself open to factually and morally persuasive attacks. Successful challenges from unfriendly quarters to the moral and factual credibility of the museum would damage Jewish prestige and the credibility of the Museum. Successful challenges would also undermine the credibility of Holocaust historians — historians who have not questioned the museum's minimizing of Gentile Polish and Soviet P.O.W.s deaths but, instead, praise the museum's treatment of the "other" victims. In the wake of a loss of credibility, Holocaust deniers and their allies would become more acceptable.
The story of the Nazi Judeocide together with the story of the other Nazi murders does, I think, carry an important practical, perhaps survival message: in modern society the debasement of one group can be a slippery slope; when members of one group are stigmatized, members of other groups are in danger. A primary task of the museum should be to transmit this message, a message that cannot be effectively expressed without acknowledging and memorializing the millions of non-Jewish Nazi victims.
The Holocaust is in the foreground of historical knowledge today largely because Jewish survivors had the power, the wit, and the will to ensure that the world did not forget what happened to them. Jewish survivors are the principal creators of the Memorial Museum, now the biggest attraction as measured by visitor hours in the monumental core of the capital of the United States. At the museum, the "challenge" of remembering the Jewish dead has been by many measures well met. But the "challenge . . . of remembering the millions of others" is not being honestly addressed. Hopefully, if historians and others speak out, Jewish survivors and Jews generally will begin to see the justice and the utility of affirming in the Memorial Museum and elsewhere that what happened to them happened to others; affirming that, while Jews held a unique place in Nazi demonology and almost six million European Jews were murdered, more than two million Polish Gentiles and more than three million Soviet Prisoners of War were also murdered.
Jonathan Petrie
Berkeley, CA
Holocaust Hype: Avoiding Inflated Vocabulary
During the last quarter century, I have become a veteran of Holocaust conferences. While cumulatively the presentations have significantly raised the standards of Holocaust scholarship, there has been a downside to the proliferation of these academic gatherings. One aspect of this has been the tendency to give pseudo-profundity to one's work by employing hyped language that adds little, neither to knowledge nor to understanding.
Not content with letting graphic information speak for itself or limiting interpretation to the narrow scope of a particular topic, many participants at Holocaust conferences have sought to provide new "insights" to the Final Solution by means of the cliché. Repetitions of worn-out phrases have become a standard mode of adding "depth" to the point of bad habit.
Again and again, one hears that the Holocaust was "a watershed event," "a defining event," "a turning point"; "a crisis" of European civilization, of Christendom, of World history; "the ultimate evil," "the crime of crimes," "the paradigm of extremism," "the unimaginable," "beyond expression," "beyond meaning," "meaningless". The list of emotives is long, much too long, and reflects a certain frustration and, possibly, mental laziness if not a lack of professional restraint and critical sensitivity. Rarely, if ever, are these claims backed by sufficiently supportive evidence to justify resorting to such flamboyant language.
There is a history of this verbal puffery. It began honestly enough. In the mid-seventies, Richard Cohen characterized the Holocaust as a "tremendum" at the conclusion of a lecture on a moral, philosophic analysis of the act of Nazi genocide. It was an apt choice with which to end an intensely probing investigation. The Holocaust was and remains a lasting shock to those who had held and still hold traditional moral value criteria with which to assess human behavior. In that sense — as an unprecedented event — the Holocaust was indeed (at least to them) new, a de novo. This needed to be said, emphatically, but once only. If subsequently repeated, then, on each occasion, credit ought to have been given to Cohen's contribution, without which the false impression is conveyed that an "insight" has been revealed.
In lieu of bona fide insight, however, there has been an unfortunate and deceptive inflation of vocabulary without a commensurate growth in intellectual depth. Reliance on superlatives has become a corrupting vogue, diminishing academic and intellectual progress. Hyperbole is no substitute for accuracy and truth; rather, it tends to degrade discussion to the level of stereotypes and buzz words. Platitudes have never been a springboard to enlightenment. At best, inflated vocabulary is self-serving; at worst, it does a disservice to Holocaust Studies.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Some Post-Conference Thoughts: Clarifying Terminology
Conferences dealing with the Holocaust inevitably trigger off words of condemnation. It was "evil," a "crime," or even an "evil crime," as if the two terms were synonymous and, therefore, interchangeable or mutually modifying: the result, confusion.
"Evil" and "crime" are, indeed "bad." In that sense the Holocaust was both; but, in as much as the two concepts are distinct, the Final Solution was two distinct though simultaneous acts: one with a moral dimension, a second with a legal framework. It is one thing to discuss the Holocaust as a violation of metaphysical/theological moral values, and quite another as a breach of legal human codes. The former leads one into the realms of ethics (of just and unjust behavior) and theology (divinely condoned or condemned behavior). The latter takes one into the world of man-made laws (the realms of prescribed and proscribed social acts).
The Holocaust as crime unquestionably is part of legal history. Once dubbed a crime against humanity, specifically a genocide, the Final Solution can be viewed strictly as a violation of legal standards and statutes. Such an approach culminates with a study of the post-Auschwitz Nuremberg trials of the International Military Tribunal and the subsequent trials held in the USSR, Poland, France, Israel, Germany and the USA.
At the heart of this approach are philosophical and legal issues of individual and collective responsibility, of the nature of guilt, and of the appropriate punishment.
The Holocaust as evil belongs foremost to philosophers, moralists, and theologians. As such, it can be viewed theoretically through the prism of any value-system. Practically, though, the Holocaust, as a violation of specific values, becomes a phenomenon of central concern to those harboring principles associated with European civilization: for example, those of Christianity, those of liberal democracy, and those of Judaism. The first and the third approach the Holocaust as potential or actual perpetrators and victims, respectively; yet both may also view the Holocaust in terms of a violation of liberal democratic ideals.
To believing Christians and Jews, however, the evil of the Holocaust raises central issues, such as the nature of sin, divine forgiveness and punishment, and, of course, the very existence and attributes of G-d.
One may not wish to divorce entirely the Holocaust as an immoral act from the Holocaust as a criminal one: the two may quite logically be linked. Sin and crime do, after all, overlap at times. Nevertheless, the terminological and, hence, conceptual differentiation needs to be maintained, or else one of the central realities of the Final Solution becomes blurred.
It was, by no means coincidentally, between 1933 and 1945, that genocide became the law of the land. Extermination was made legal, and to obey the law of the state was, therefore, sinful and immoral from both a Christian and Jewish point of view. To preserve one's integrity as an autonomous citizen with a moral conscience meant to rebel against a totalitarian state which had decreed an evil as good and wrong behavior as right. Civil disobedience and rebellion (moral and political) during the Third Reich was at once the only right political and moral stance against state policy that was simultaneously immoral and illegal, an inherent two-headed evil and, therefore, a sin/crime, the law notwithstanding.
The simultaneity of sin and crime in the Holocaust, however, is not a license to fuse them into one and the same act. Viewing the Holocaust separately as a criminal and immoral act can be "measured" according to prevailing legal statutes and moral codes which in a liberal democracy are not one and the same. Moral values and the civil law in civilized societies are never synonymous and constantly in a state of tense relationship without which genocide is made possible as was the case in Nazi Germany.
Henry R. Huttenbach
** Announcement **
Readers, especially instructors, are urged to acquaint themselves with a relatively new publication that may prove useful to their efforts to teach the Holocaust and Genocide. Pogrom is a journal devoted to the study of "Threatened Peoples" and appears each four months.
Its office is located in Via Trieste 11, 50139 Florence, Italy.
Phone: (39) 55 48 59 27; Fax: (39) 55 48 86 00
A Welcome
The editor and the editorial staff of The Genocide Forum heartily welcome the appearence of the Newsletter of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies (Macquaire University) edited by Daren O'Brien. It is now in its second year.
While the Newsletter focuses more on disseminating information such as Centre activities, publications, etc., we at The Genocide Forum now look forward to the appearance of Vol.1, No. 1 of the Centre's journal, Genocide Studies. There is always room for yet another forum in which to cross the swords of scholarship and engage in unafraid discussions of sensitive issues.