At the Heart of the Holocaust: "Life Unworthy of Living"

Genocide rests on the dehumanization of the victim. Those that reasoned toward the annihilation of the Jews predicated their murderous action on an abstraction, "the Jew" ( Der Jude), devoid of all human qualities. According to Nationalist Socialist racial theorists, those who made up the totality of "World Jewry" were the antithesis of what one associated with humanity. So what was it that underlay National Socialist's genocidal thought that rationally accounts for that crusade known as the Final Solution (Die Endlösung)?

To date, most Holocaust studies searching for the nucleus of the ideology of genocide focus on the phenomenon of antisemitism, specifically on what has been dubbed radical distinguished from traditional antisemitism. The latter is associated with a millennium and a half of implacable clerical Christian theological anti-Judaism, along with the secular, post-Enlightenment, socio-economic Judeophobia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in contrast, the former is linked to the more recent stream of racism, which spawned an antisemitism increasingly woven to the strand of late nineteenth and twentieth century xenophobic nationalism: illiberal, anti-democratic, and anti-intellectual. The earlier animus against Jews, no matter how depraved and vilifying, never fully denied their essential humanity. It either sought to limit association with Jews and thwart full social equality or it insisted on conversion (assimilation) as the price for unqualified social integration. This contradiction-riddled tradition, regardless of the periodic outbursts of violence it spawned and sometimes encouraged, never called for the outright physical eradication of the Jewish population amidst the Christian majority. In stark contrast, the modern radical form of racist-inspired antisemitism voiced unrestrained demonization of the Jewish minority. It did so in the setting of a mass secular, urban, and technological society, exploiting all its socio-pathological alienation by means of a polarized rhetoric, dividing the world into "we" and "they." Hierarchic, elitist, racist nationalism heightened the capacity totally to marginalize "the Other," in this case those belonging to an (evil) clandestine abstraction known as "World Jewry" ( Weltjudentum). In this Manichaean context, Jews became the enemy, the anti-race, the very antithesis of human life, a species — by definition — non-human (unmenschlich); on the racist scale of human beings, Jews were classified on the lowest rung of the sub-human (Untermenschen).

But how did this ideological categorization lead to genocidal action? Traditional Christian and bourgeois Judeophobia were insufficient, not only for their inherent moderation, but also because the Nazi regime was overtly both anti-Christian and anti-rationalist. What was needed was another stimulus, one supplied by eugenic thought.

By the end of World War I, a fundamentally new concept was entering into the general vocabulary of German conservatives, the term Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of living). The term received its boost in 1920, thanks to a sixty-four page revolutionary essay by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, "On the Right to Terminate Lives Unworthy of Living." In their study a dozen groups were classified as socially dispensable, as having forfeited the right to live. It took little imagination to see why this notion of "Lives Unworthy of Living" could be incorporated into Nazi antisemitism. Once the precedent had been set labeling groups as "unworthy," there was no reason not to apply it to Jews as a whole. What traditional anti-Judaism could not do — point in the direction of the Extermination Camps — racist eugenic-inspired antisemitism did with eloquent simplicity.

The idea of Lebensunwertes Leben is at once haunting and horrifying. It is particularly shocking, morally and philosophically, to those rooted in a value-system that holds life as supreme. Philosophically the concept of Lebensunwertes Leben denies that life per se, intrinsically, is its own justification; instead, the idea of a life unworthy of living demands an external validation for the continued existence of any person, for his/her being. Morally, the term suggests that life is not a (permanent) good in itself unless it meets certain objective criteria, standards that endow it with a (temporary) raison d'être.

Politically, the logic of Lebensunwertes Leben grants the state, in the name of society, the power to determine who is "worthy" and who is "unworthy," that is, who shall live and who shall die. Those doomed to be "unworthy" are, therefore, "worthless" to society. In such a totally utilitarian setting, the "useless" must be disposed of, like refuse. Such a "pragmatic" society is obligated to rid itself of those deemed to have lost their claim to life. Once this line of reasoning is adopted, the philosophic path to Auschwitz is not so difficult to trace. Jews, according to National Socialist thought, were judged lacking any attribute to justify their existence. They were the ultimate social parasite — devourers of resources without contributing any redeemable value.

Significantly, this ideological conclusion rests not on anti-Judaism but on racism. The key to the rationale for the Final Solution lies within a nationalism devoted to the potential dehumanization of all people. For if Jews can be classified by the state as "unworthy of living" one day, then another group can lose its status as "worthy of living" the next. It is reminiscent of the guillotine; once introduced, it made no discrimination between its victims.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Famine and Genocide: Starvation as Weapon

Natural disasters are part of life: among them are the disruption of the cycle of food production by drought, flood, or blight. Human kind has learned to combat these threats. Several civilizations have been built around the fear of large-scale food shortages: 1) the Chinese devised an ingenious canal and dam system to contain and divert excess water; 2) the Egyptians hit upon the state granary. Thus, humans have sought to outwit nature in the ever-present mortal struggle against hunger, famine, and starvation.

There is also man-induced hunger, when food is available but denied. In war, generals have destroyed the enemy's crops in hopes of accelerating capitulation; in defense, cities under siege have stockpiled food supplies and rationed them carefully hoping to outlasting the foe. It was a serious game but a game with rules. The intention was victory, not death or extermination.

Then there is another kind of hunger, man-made starvation as punishment and as policy. There are countless cases of individual political prisoners sadistically condemned to die by withholding food, and in the last two centuries there have been over half a dozen cases of mass starvation as a result of concerted efforts to prevent food from reaching entire populations to the point of genocide.

Those familiar with the Holocaust know all too well the fate of the half-million Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in which they were consciously and willfully condemned to slow starvation, as the Nazis systematically limited food supplies below what the remaining population needed. The story was no different in other ghettos; and the threat of death from malnutrition heightened once Jews were herded into concentration camps. It is safe to say as many died from lack of nutrition as were gassed. Artificial famine, therefore, was a key weapon in the arsenal of those who designed the Final Solution. Death by starvation, despite ample food supplies, is an integral fact of the Holocaust experience. Any survivor will recall the centrality of hunger in the memories etched on his or her psyche.

Shockingly, Jews are not alone in sharing victimization by government-induced starvation. Contemporaneous to the Final Solution another terrible avoidable famine felled between 5-6 million people. It occurred in the midst of World War II, in Bengal (then a part of British colonial India), as a result of criminal maladministration: corrupt bureaucrats and speculators merchants slowed the process of food distribution in the hopes of making huge illicit profits. Within one year, between 1942 and 1943 (note the dates in relation to the Holocaust), a regional population had been decimated as a result of human decisions that brought on this catastrophe.

A decade earlier, in Stalin's Soviet Union, another kind of mass starvation was brought on by government action. In order to force the peasantry to comply with his revolutionary policy of collectivization, Stalin launched a heartless campaign against the agrarian heartland of the USSR, predominantly located in Ukraine. Using the army and other security forces, Stalin forcibly removed the harvest from the countryside and put it under state control, thereby launching a region-wide food crisis. In short order, millions of people who had been targeted as anti-revolutionary kulaks were starving and dying. At the same time, the government blocked all roads and railroads into the southern region to prevent any large-scale food smuggling, virtually sealing Ukraine from the outside world. Meanwhile, the Soviet government rerouted the harvest from Ukraine to other parts of the Soviet Union to promote industrial expansion. To this day, demographers are still calculating the human loss of that year; conservative estimates run between five and seven million victims of the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. Several scholars have branded Stalin's policy as genocidal by design. That still remains to be seen.

One other example of man-made famine to the level of genocide: this occurred in the middle of the 19th century, in Ireland, then a colony of Great Britain.

In 1845, a blight struck the potato harvest of Ireland; the potato was a diet staple of that impoverished English colony. Four harvests were ruined by the disease, and each year the hunger of the Irish grew incrementally. The Great Hunger could have been averted, or at least significantly alleviated, had the government in London cared to do so. Instead, it exploited the situation, cynically hoping the crisis would solve the "Irish Problem," by reducing the belligerently, unfriendly Roman Catholic population. Between 1845 and 1850, Ireland's population plunged from around eight to four million. About a million were saved by immigration to the United States (though thousands perished in hundreds of ill-equipped boats which sank en route). To make matters worse, the English actually sold on the open market what remaining harvest was salvaged not whishing to destabilize prices by making available large amount of cheap food for the Irish poor.

Artificial famine, therefore, in the context of mass-death, genocidal in scope, has had a pre-Holocaust history that needs to be taken into account when teaching the background of the Final Solution. Man-made famine as an instrument of genocidal destruction needs to be studied as a subject in its own right. There is much to be learned from this political technique as it is transformed into state policy and administered by government institutions.

By no means in passing, one should note that the worst artificial famines took place after the Holocaust. It happened twenty years later in the China of Mao Tse-tung in the context of the revolutionary upheaval he sehe final total of deaths by famine is a matter of debate in the absence of definitive documentation. However, cautious estimates by independent scholars suggest twenty million people died as a consequence of the famine engineered by the Chinese government. The purpose was not explicitly genocide, but, given the geographic focus of the famine, specific regions were the targets of the government and, therefore, one may accurately brand this famine as genocidal. The link between man-conceived famine and genocide is far too close to be ignored. Neither rural nor urban populations are secure from a state determined to starve them into submission or extinction.

Henry R. Huttenbach

The terminological Path to Genocide: In Search of Connections

No matter how, when, where, or why genocide takes place, it is a task of the analyst to find common denominators. Landmark concepts need to be devised to provide some clarity to what would otherwise be cloaked in the emotive language of horror and the words of isolated details. Connections can only be made with abstractions: clarity, meaning and a sense of the rational continuity of events come about only with a parallel chain of connected concepts that provide a skeletal grasp of what genocide is about other than raw extermination. Most important is to pinpoint what ingredients underlie the killings, especially the mental categories that govern pre- and genocidal behavior. What are they with respect to the Holocaust in particular, and how are they interrelated? Herewith a rationalized list that proves useful to teachers:

Racism: Nazi genocidal thought and action rested, first and foremost, on racial categories, on the hierarchic compartmentalization of the human species into races, with the Jewish "race" ranked lowest, a status assisted by the adoption of negative characteristics borrowed from other sources, such as -
Antisemitism : various threads - recent and ancient - of this collective animus contribute to enhancing Nazi racism. Political (nationalist), social and religious antisemitic images of Jews and Judaism fed into the Nazis' version of racial antisemitism. These images become fixed to form permanent -
Stereotypes: Centuries of accumulated images of "the Jew" provided a wide range of images: the Jews as Christ-killers, as the embodiment of greed (The Merchant of Venice), as rapacious, as scheming (The Protocol of the Elders of Zion), as treacherous (the Dreyfus Affair), as capitalist exploiters (the Rotschilds) and as communist conspirators (Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky). This array of caricatures supplied the Nazi racial antisemitic arsenal with ample ammunition for the creation of a vile, anti-human, stereotype of Jews in order to regiment anti-Jewish sentiments (prejudice) latent in society.
Prejudice: This is the raw energy that governments can harness against any target group in society. Centuries of anti-Jewish stereotypes had long nourished European culture, German Kultur in particular. Some aspects of this antipathy were always above ground while others hibernated close to the surface waiting to be activated by circumstances: the plague, currency crises, unemployment, civil war, defeat in war, and/or revolution. Politically it was a matter of timing. Whatever the external "trigger," the animation of society against Jews rested on a single principle: the fear of the other.
Xenophobia (the fear of the stranger): Jews throughout Europe were never fully integrated, always exposed to some degree of exclusion. Thus, as was the case in Germany, despite considerable assimilation on their part, German Jews remained the classic outsiders, subject to constant suspicion. Consequently, once the protective legal machinery of emancipation was systematically dismantled from 1933 on, xenophobia in Germany began to have free rein in its antisemitic form, cynically orchestrated by a racist regime determined to initiate a full scale program of rejection of the Jewish community, by causally associating them with all that was wrong in the world.
Scapegoats: Once a minority group is feared and caricatured, it can easily be blamed for literally any ill that afflicts the majority. Jews were blamed for every "sin" suffered by Germany: the disastrous loss of World War I, the great inflation of the early twenties, the chronic unemployment of the post-war years, and the devastating Depression of the late twenties and early thirties, not to mention the threat of a Communist Revolution.

Taken together, these six concepts were part of a lethal formula for the Nazi campaign against the Jews of Europe. The crucial transition from thought to action came in the form of hate speech, itself a controversial concept, the much debatable link between the idea and the deed, between the private and the public.

Hate speech: Taken in isolation, hate speech is essentially speech, giving voice to internalized emotions of resentment, fueled by the stereotypes of prejudice, xenophobia, antisemitism and racism, and aimed at a vulnerable scapegoat. Seen in a broader context, as part of a systematic campaign of a barrage of inflammatory language (including graffiti, posters, newspapers and radio), hate speech - by sheer quantity and intensity - becomes action. In Nazi Germany it was explicitly designed to incite and not to engage idle thought. Hate speech in such a context has but one purpose, violent social action and/or support of government-sponsored violence and policy, including genocide.

In Nazi Germany's case, this campaign of antisemitic public action and policy came in the form of four stages: 1) Segregation, 2) Persecution, 3) Deportation, and 4) Annihilation. The first three required some degree of tacit or active public participation from a society psychologically motivated and manipulated by elements of the six categories outlined above. Only the fourth, the final stage, genocide, need have no public consensus if committed abroad (in the east, i.e. in Poland and the USSR). However, extermination, if committed at home (e.g. Rwanda) requires substantial public support and, in this case, wide-spread participation.

In short, the specifics of the Nazi genocide reflect the Holocaust's singularity (not its uniqueness). The theoretical concepts, such as those outlined above, however, more or less all apply in some measure to other instances of group extermination. At the very least, they should provide a cluster of sequential stages of thought and action, a conceptual skeleton with which to determine the individual specificity and commonality of other genocides.

Two caveats: 1) No two genocides, of course, are the same; hence, other concepts may have to be brought into play; and 2) no inference of determinism is intended. That is, the way from prejudice to genocide is by no means automatic; the connection between thought and action is, as yet, largely terra incognita and needs to be fully explored beyond today's still simplistic answers.

Henry R. Huttenbach