"Slavery and Genocide - Finding a Nexus": A Reply
I believe your article was written with the best of intentions and I wholeheartedly endorse your conclusion that the two phenomena need more study and better understanding. That is why I'm writing.
While I recognize the difference between de jure and de facto slavery, in discussing slavery as a general concept one must take into account any given real possibility to determine what is inherent and what is adjustable according to human factors such as moral codes. Therefore, though slavery is always a matter of human rights, one cannot jump to the conclusion that in any case an owned person is automatically reduced to the subhuman level. Human ownership and a unilateral relationship of total subordination is inhumane and unfair, but in some situations of slavery and/or torture the subject remains human. There are varying degrees to which the slave owner sees his subject as human and thus treats him accordingly. In biblical days there was a policy that was sometimes followed which allowed slaves to choose freedom after a given period of time. More recently on these shores there were owners who felt it important to educate their slaves and eventually set them free. Also there were owners who had the legal right to exercize the power of life and death, but dispensed with that right according to personal ethics. The reduction of a person to subhuman depends on law, willingness to carry out such a law, and one's degree of resistance to inhuman and demeaning treatment. One may have no choice but to be a slave but he may remain fully human.
In genocide the same would be true if it weren't for the obvious fact that the successful carrying out of policy reduces a person to non-human level by killing him. Of course the attempt to reduce a group of people to subhuman status in the eyes of the perpetrators and victims-to-be is a tool used in both slavery and genocide, but some can resist such notions. One cannot however resist being dehumanized by machine gun, artillery or poisonous gas.
It is interesting that you note that some Christians were among those who sought to help humanize the wretched conditions of slaves. They were also among those who pointed to the bible to justify slavery even in its basest forms. This seems to have been done without the understanding that in biblical days the policies governing slavery tried to prevent such wretched conditions.
You also claim that in slavery and genocide victims are rounded up en masse. This is often true, but with many exceptions. In biblical days people were often sold into slavery as individuals. Even during the Holocaust, though every attempt was made to round up people en masse , and most people were caught that way, logistics didn't allow that type of roundup to operate in every case.
One has to clearly define genocide to decide what is unambiguously genocidal. Many historians discern between ethnic cleansing and genocide largely on the basis of intent. Other important differences are also attatched to the issue of intent. Torching villages, killing men, and even wiping out communities are often done without the intent to eliminate an entire people. Armenians in Turkey were safe if they lived in Smyrna or Constantinople or in some cases if they were willing to convert to Islam. Jews during the Holocaust were sought out by Germans wherever they could reach them, and conversion was not a viable option. Moreover, since the intent was genocide, and not ethnic cleansing, as many women of child-bearing age as possible were targeted, not just men and boys. During the middle passage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade hundreds of thousands of Africans were killed by starvation, disease and abuse. Still use of the term genocide is wrong unless one accepts a looser definition, namely the mass murder of individuals in one group, rather than a policy of annihilation of all the members in a group.
The use of slavery as a tool in the Holocaust was more often a step in the process of execution, rather than a reprieve from it. Some slave labor, such as many of the tasks performed at the "punishment" camp Mauthausen, was meant to be non-productive and a way to kill people through exhaustion and debasement. (By the way it wasn't always the SS who commanded the Jews or decided their fates. This job was often delegated to German soldiers or non-Jewish prisoners.)
I agree with your general premise that slavery and genocide have much in common; in fact slavery can be a tool or subset of genocide. Scholars need to define their terms clearly and appreciate the similarities and differences in overlapping phenomena. Only then can we come closer to true understanding.
Lauren Buchsbaum (St. Louis Holocaust Museum)
Forced Labor, Not Slave Labor
Almost without exception, involuntary labor organized by Nazi Germany during World War II has been referred to as "slave" labor. This is inherently wrong and has helped seriously to distort ones precise understanding of the Third Reich.
As the fortunes of war waned for Germany in mid-1942, it quickly became clear that a chronic if not fatal labor shortage faced the architects of the government's war economy. As the war dragged on and the Soviet Union failed to collapse and capitulate, Germany's military necessarily began to make greater economic demands. Huge losses, unsustainable in the long run, forced the military recruiters to cut into the industrial and agricultural labor forces, threatening a strategic problem, a drop in production just when the reverse a dramatic increase was called for. Both the expanding eastern as well as the Mediterranean theaters of war required more and more manpower and the commensurate economic productivity just to prevent the shift in the tide of war from becoming a rapid defeat.
Already since 1941 hundreds of thousands of Jews doomed to die were forced to work in various capacities behind the eastern front. The sudden war emergency had postponed the slaughter of the able-bodied. At best, however, these Jewish men and women were but an auxiliary labor force compared to the overall needs of Germany's war economy. Hence the turn towards a labor force drawn from the civilian populations of German occupied Europe. In short order, hundreds of thousands of French, Belgiums, Poles, etc. were forcibly herded into Germany to provide the labor Germany's strained population could no longer provide.
These "importees" worked on farms, in factories, and in caves (on secret projects such as the V-1 and V-2 rocket projects). Arguably, their contributions helped significantly to boost Germany's war economy. The harvests they helped cultivate fed the population at large; the war supplies they helped build the tanks and planes, etc. prolonged the war and added to its dreadful toll on civilian lives and property. But they did so involuntarily, not as willing allies, but as reluctant, quasi-prisoners and enemies of Nazi Germany. They did so, most of them suffering inhuman conditions; uncounted thousands died from mistreatment that, at numerous locations, almost surpassed the bestiality experienced in ghettos and concentration camps. Their sufferings deprivation of any legal protection resembled that of slaves. Their powerlessness in the face of their cruel and murderous German masters indeed made them feel like slaves. But slaves they were not, not according to a strict definition of slavery.
Slaves are, firstly, an economic commodity, a property and an investment. Slavery is both an economic transaction between seller and buyer, but also a legal arrangement. The slave is property as defined by law or custom, a condition, for example, that empowered the owner and, usually, consigned the slaves' progeny to inherited slave status. None of this was operative in the German use of their involuntary foreign labor. The only similarity was the lack of consensuality, true for slaves as well as for foreign workers: both worked under duress and lacked the power to alter their circumstances.
Nevertheless, the foreign workers in Germany had not been purchased. Nor were they subject to being sold by one factory to another. If they "belonged" to anyone it was to the Nazi state, but no law or contract to that affect existed. To be sure, most of their German supervisors treated them as if they were slaves and not free workers. They received no wages, had no mutually agreed upon working hours. They were exploited totally and had no recourse to any authority that would recognize their interests. They were, without a doubt, subjected to a level of slavery, but they were not slaves in fact.
Among the foreign workers were some who had been lured by promises of high wages. Driven by hunger, these individuals were seduced by clever Nazi propaganda, only to discover upon arrival inside Germany that they were nothing more than prisoners dragooned into the Third Reich's gigantic war effort. They retained their citizenship and, if they survived, fully expected to return home after the war. None anticipated a permanent life in Germany. Even the Germans underscored the temporary status of their presence in Germany. Those who worked in the countryside as farm hands generally had a better time compared to those on short rations in the factories. Mistreatment often depended on their race: thus, on the whole, the French workers were treated a little more benignly than those from Poland who were regarded as "Untermenschen" by some of their racist overseers. Indeed, race classification was a major factor in determining overall treatment.
The distinction between slave and forced labor may seem somewhat belabored and over-analytic. Nevertheless, it does point to fundamental distinctions that deserves highlighting. The coercive character of non-German labor forces brought to Germany during World War II needs to be understood not in terms of slavery but as part of a despotic state unable to attain triumphant victory and helpless to stop a cataclysmic defeat. The phenomenon was part of a tragic drama of the war and of the Nazi vision to reconstruct Europe along radical racial lines.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Hate and the Dynamics of Genocide
The word "hate" crops up in two contexts when discussing genocide: 1) when referring to the vocabulary of a) rhetoric (speech) and b) print (writing) aimed at a specific target group; and 2) when assessing the intensity of a) prejudice (feeling) and b) the depth of negative attitudes (thought) for another group. Though closely related, the two categories are distinct. In brief, hate-filled words expressed about and to a particular group are selected to convey the hateful characteristics associated with the group's stereotype. In as much as a stereotype is elevated to scapegoat status, to a group made responsible for something heinous, the range and intensity of hate rhetoric escalates commensurably.
In most cases the anatomy of hatred in the context of genocide has not been given sufficient attention. The word is often used in its popular form and not as a technical term, as an integral concept in the psychology of genocide, as a word having a very precise specificity. All too often "hate" and "hatred" are used interchangeably. Similarly, hate synonymous with burning rage is assumed, as if extreme emotions were a constant in the execution of genocide, when common sense should tell one of the impossibility of sustained intense feeling, whether joy or despair, or passion and hate. Powerful emotions, in the long term, are unsustainable; they soon dissipate and are unreliable as a force to carry out complex projects such as genocide. A lynch-mob mentality has no place in genocidal thought. Genocide requires cold, calculated planning and administration. There is no room for the ebb and flow of emotional behavior. Genocide is a policy; it is not a mood.
This fundamental distinction was best embodied in the struggle between the SA and the SS who held bitterly opposed alternative approaches toward the reconstruction of Germany according to National Socialist racial doctrine. The former based its tactics on the unrealistic and contradictory premise of prolonged spontaneity, of revolution by means of on-going high pitched fervor and animosity (hate for Jews). The latter, correctly, predicated its policy for a racial revolution in the Third Reich on a carefully constructed blueprint for systematic action, dependent not on emotional zealotry but on correct thought, reasoning and attitude (hatred) funneled through disciplined organizations.
What is centrally operative in state-induced genocide is not emotional hate but cerebral hatred. The former burns bright but briefly, as does a match; the latter burns long and subterraneously like a nuclear reactor, a self-renewing resource always on tap, regardless of circumstances and fickle feelings. What fuels intellectual antisemitism is an undercurrent of highly-charged hate-stimulating ideas, concepts and conclusions that encourage radical action (à la SS) distinct from isolated outburst (à la SA). Antisemitism feeds off structural antipathies, some of them genocidal.
In the chemistry of the ideology of genocide (as distinct from the psychology of non-genocidal prejudice) is the phenomenon of "cold hatred" as opposed to "hot hate." The latter has a short life-span, whereas the former contains a more permanent characteristic. "Hot hate" is basically intemperate, unpredictable and, by extension, unreliable; while "cold hatred" can be tapped at will, a sine qua non for genocidal behavior. Teachers of genocide, of the Holocaust above all, ought to take care not to mistake one for the other and not to telescope one into the other. The two kinds of hate have distinctly separate meanings and functions in the dynamics of genocide. Both need to be carefully identified if clarity is to be a goal in studying the inner workings of genocide.
One mark of the clinical efficiency of the Third Reich was the SS state, the state within the state. It functioned along strict, bureaucratic, impersonal lines. Philosophic hatred of lower races, Jews in particular as an anti-race, was the core hate principle at work, ever present to act as a prime mover with its overarching idea of hatred the Jew as mortal, racial enemy. This is what underlay the Final Solution. Those who met in January 1942 at the Wannsee were not overcome by paroxies of hate. On the contrary, they gathered to synchronize under SS supervision their respective agencies to a single goal. They did so calmly, more or less united in their task by a mutual philosophic conviction to annihilate European Jewry. Theirs was not a revival meeting to whip up antisemitic fervor. That was not necessary any more since the guiding motif was a common vision based on racist values to which they were all devoted, almost as if without feeling. They assembled as an ad hoc committee, as divorced from feelings of hate as those who, unmoved, decide on the slaughter of thousands of cattle for the meat market. They were carrying out a "sacred" duty, like loyal servants of the state. They hated their victims only in the most abstract manner, à distance, impersonally, somewhat as a general in military headquarters, far from the frenzy of battle, has some empathy for the front-line soldiers whom he orders to their deaths.
The hatred generated by genocide is one fed by faith, faith in the justness of one's cause. Purpose and conviction are its byproducts, not rage. Fury may express itself, but it is non-essential in the conduct of genocide. Eichmann seldom, if ever, expressed his genocidal ambitions in anger. On the contrary, he worked with efficient thoroughness, demanding punctuality, reliability, method and accuracy from his subordinates, only a minimum of enthusiasm (hatred for Jews). Much of that was pro forma, of little value to the administration of mass death. What was critical was a focus on the genocidal task; and that called for unqualified devotion to the ideology of Jew-hatred and not to the feeling of hate for Jews. While the latter could be a distraction from the ultimate goal, the former never deviated from it.
Henry. R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Two Poems by Charles Fishman:
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Erratum
Eric Joseph Epstein, author of "Hating the Holocaust" (Forum 3/1) has sent the following communication: "In 'Hating the Holocaust' I suggested Mel Mermelstein used the proceeds from a lawsuit to set up the Auschwitz Study Foundation. The Foundation was in existence prior to his lawsuit against the 'Institute for Historical review.' Mr. Mermelstein did not sue the 'Institute' for a financial reward. Moreover, his efforts have exposed the 'Institute' and seriously damaged its ability to disseminate hate."