The Genocide Forum
Table of Contents
- Bosnia's Killing Fields: The Memory War
- From the Informed Mind to the Quickened Heart: The Bystander Syndrome
- A Poem: "Indifference"
- A Review: The Holocaust and Sociology
- A Footnote: Cattle Cars or Freight Cars?
Bosnia's Killing Fields: The Memory war
There is no crime without evidence. A genocide cannot be written about in the absence of factual proof. Without the mass graves as testimony of systematic killing, lacking the proof rendered by skeleton-filled crematoria, and not in possession of thousands of deportation lists, one would have been hard put to establish the historicity of the Holocaust. Destruction of information was, therefore, high on the list of the Nazi genocidists. Death Camps (e.g . Treblinka) were to be reduced to their former pristine, rural conditions; camp records were to be burned; and mass graves were to be opened and their semi-decomposed bodies burned to ashes. According to the National Socialist architects of the Final Solution, there was to be no evidence, no incriminating data with which to record the event destined by the Nazis to become a non-event. Only the speed of the Allied advances and of German military collapse disrupted the timetable of destroying the evidence.
A similar drama is now taking place in Bosnia. As NATO forces settle into their respective zones, fresh mass graves threaten hundreds of criminals with being brought up on verifiable charges. Hence the hectic struggle to control the mass killing sites between those wishing to preserve them and those desirous of destroying them. In each of the three Bosnian NATO zones, there are one or more mass graves, evidence of ethnic cleansing, of genocidal behavior. As peace descends on a murderous region, a new war, the struggle for memory has erupted. A race is on for the killing fields and their macabre contents. It is a struggle reminiscent of the story of the Katyn Forest where Stalin's NKVD soldiers buried nearly 14,000 Polish officers in three secret mass graves after having them systematically shot in 1940. The purpose was to decimate the anti-Russian and anti-Communist Polish national elite, above all the officer corps, to offset a post-war resurgence of Polish nationalism. Uncovered in 1943 by the Nazis during their occupation of Poland in 1941-4 of (then) Eastern Poland (the former Soviet zone), the evidence pointed to the Soviets, though they strenuously denied it until Yeltsin openly admitted Soviet guilt in 1993. However, without the actual graves and their bodies, the event would have rested on useless suspicion and speculation and would finally have evaporated from memory and been absent from the record of the war.
And now for the fresh mass graves in Bosnia: their content is political dynamite. They could implicate all three sides, Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosnians, as guilty of ethnocide. A UN-sponsored international court in The Hague has been collecting evidence to indict anyone associated with the killings. Over 58 men have been indicted so far: all have been identified and some located, but not yet extradicted. Except for one Serb sent for trial to The Hague from Germany, all suspects are in Bosnia, eager to destroy the evidence. This they may do, unless NATO intervenes aggressively. But will it? There have been overflights, but little more to assure the integrity of the grave sites.
So far, NATO officials have remained studiously aloof of the problem. Local commanders hide behind their limited mandate: to separate the warring sides and to bring about a lasting cease-fire as a prelude to peace. Ferreting out accused genocidists and protecting mass graves is not NATO's primary task according to official policy pronouncements. Meanwhile, since the arrival of NATO troops to carry out the Dayton Accord, some Serb graves are being opened up by Bosnian Serbs and their bodies removed. Evidence of genocidal ethnic-cleansing is being willfully destroyed under the eyes of seemingly disinterested NATO troops. NATO will neither reach out to arrest "President" Rodovan Karadzic and "General" Rakto Mladic nor take full control of the sites of known mass graves of victims of ethnocide. Satellite pictures show how some graves are being deliberately tampered with; the destruction of evidence, itself a crime, is, so far, being aided and abetted by a largely passive NATO force, that is, by the governments of the peace-keeping troops, including those of the United States.
President Bill Clinton needs to be asked what US policy is in this matter. Each day more evidence disappears; each day the safe futures of genocidists are being assured as killing fields become regular fields again. Sooner than later, all of Bosnia may look like landscaped Treblinka, tranquil with the silence of emptied graves, thanks to a flawed US-guided NATO policy.
What grand strategy underlies this folly? A reunited Bosnia against the will of all its three ethnic warring parties? What raison d'état explains the policy of "neutrality" in the war against memory in Bosnia? It seems as if the spirit of the Nuremberg Trials is being blatantly ignored. Will the legacy of Bosnia be a UN tribunal unenthusiastically supported by the international community and denied of most suspects and of the evidence against them? What a cynical finale to a dreary century! What lessons can be drawn from this episode in the history of genocide, other than plus ça change, moins ça change? It seems as even those who do know history are destined to repeat it! Is that the only lesson? It is not too late to alter the course; but intellectuals must get involved and protest. Or will we have yet another instance of la trahison des intellectuels?
P.S. Recent news is slightly more encouraging, if only with respect to the thorough investigations of the mass graves around Srebrenica. Nevertheless, the court remains woefully underfunded, most graves continue to be disturbed, and Belgrade has announced that, according to its constitution, Serbia is not obligated to extradite anyone.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
From the Informed Mind to the Quickened Heart: The Bystander Syndrome
The Genocide Drama, as exemplified so tragically by the Holocaust, includes three personae dramatis, the genocidists, the victims, and the onlookers the 'bystanders', the term now in common usage. The three relate to one another unevenly. The relationship between genocidist and victim is, first and foremost, legal, the former committing a crime against the latter; theirs is the bond that links the guilty to the innocent. Fundamentally, this interconnection poses few irresolvable philosophic problems; at stake is the rectification of an injustice by determining guilt and the appropriate punishment for the crime.
The relations between genocidist and bystander are far more complex. On the one hand, there is a legal dimension, especially when the bystander does nothing, thereby measurably further empowering the genocidist and/or further endangering the victim. This is a form of tacit cooperation and pushes this particular category of bystander in the direction of the overt collaborator, who, by definition, is often as guilty as the primary genocidist. The bystander deserves the status of quasi collaborator, especially when he is in possession of some means to thwart genocide or, at least, to offer significant protection to the potential victims. In that case, his non-activity must be judged morally unless there is a legal compulsion.
In considering the bystanders' abilities to intervene, we move out of the realm of pure justice to the murkier waters of morality. For the issue here is not just whether the bystanders can add to or subtract from the crime of genocide, but whether they should. It is not just a matter of legal obligation but one of a moral imperative. The question is "May the bystander remain aloof of an international crime such as genocide or must he become actively involved, no matter what the costs?" Should political considerations be subordinated to moral values? Thus, in the face of the knowledge of genocide, ought unhesitating, moralized action against genocide follow? We know it does not, for there seems to be an intermediary stage of psychological consideration between what the mind knows (cognizance) and what moves the heart (conscience). Moral behavior is not an automatic reflex that comes in the wake of an enlightened mind. A whole mechanism of rationalizations block direct access of one to the other. And herein lies the problematic of assessing the character of the bystander.
Bystanders as understood in the genocide context - are informed to some degree. In light of this knowledge they are theoretically supposed to spring into action as if their awareness must automatically trigger off their conscience. But that is not how things work. What one knows only filters through to the will in as much as it is allowed to do so. Bystanders harboring sympathies for the genocidists will have prejudices against the victims and feel no compulsion to stop what they approve of in principle.
There were many Polish clerics who, while regretting the suffering imposed on the Polish nation by the cruel German invasion and occupation, tacitly accepted it because the same evil was ridding Poland of its Jewish population. Similarly, Anthony Eden, England's wartime foreign minister, saw no reason to berate Germany for its mass slaughter of Jews, for this would lessen the post-war clamor for entrance into British Mandate Palestine. These types of cynical, perverse theology and calculated diplomacy are the marks of the mental operations creating an abyss between the morally informed mind and moralized action. The filtration process leads to compromising action and non-action that cloud the moral dimensions of genocide. If they can compromise the moral character of the victims (and surely Poles were also victims though not of genocide) and of those who fought Germany and its Nazism (as did England) then surely pinpointing the moral accountability of the bona fide bystander is no less complex.
Take Switzerland as a case in point; no country epitomized more the bystander-state during the Holocaust. As we long knew, Switzerland virtually sealed its borders against Jewish refugees already before World War II, and, as we are now beginning to learn concretely, after decades of suspicion, the country profited considerably from its illicit contacts with Nazi Germany and from its life-threatened victims and their endangered wealth. Swiss banks sheltered Jewish money while the Swiss government denied the owners asylum from certain death. Even more reprehensible, Switzerland now holds tenaciously onto the deposits of these Jews, erecting mountains of hurdles against the heirs and other claimants. According to certain standards, Switzerland belongs in the ranks of the bystandercollaborationist states, with one foot in the arena where it must be judged according to international law and another foot in the sphere of morality by whose criteria it also has to be judged.
Another case in point is Sweden, also a clear-cut example of a bystander-state. Like Switzerland, Sweden openly traded with Germany and England, exploiting its advantage as a neutral state, willing to profit from both sides. However, unlike Switzerland, Swedish authorities generously allowed political and Jewish refugees to cross its borders and find haven inside Sweden, despite the provocation this meant to the Third Reich. Anti-German Norwegian activists fled to Sweden by the hundreds across the mountains; and almost all of Danish Jewry crossed the narrow straits to Sweden. Switzerland had blocked entrance to Jewish refugees on account of its stated fear of German military intervention, when all along it knew this excuse had absolutely no validity in known facts. Militarily, Sweden was far more vulnerable than Switzerland to German attack, and yet its authorities knew retaliation was unlikely were they to extend asylum to Norwegians and Jews. Most important, the risk, however slight, was taken; lives were saved by a Sweden that distinguished between legitimate legal neutrality in war between two traditional contestants and the evil of moral neutrality in the context of Germany's genocidal, racist war against civilian Jews.
What remains tantalizing is the question: what allowed Sweden to make the differentiation? Why did Switzerland refuse to distinguish between these two kinds of neutrality? For, by definition, the bystander prefers to stand in a morally neutral zone, informed but unmoved, the mind divorced from the heart by the gymnastics of obscurantist rationalizations and hollow justifications.
As we enter into another era of bitter ethno-conflicts and the accompanying dangers of looking on with pious pronouncements of condemnation unaccompanied by stern intervention, we should study more closely the twisted psychology and convoluted ramifications of the bystander phenomenon. Failure to do so is in itself a symptom of gross indifference, qualifying one for membership in the growing ranks of the guilty bystander, the one who knew, and, by doing nothing aided and abetted an act of genocide. As the history of Bosnia is written, a large chapter will have to be devoted to the four years of inactivity by the West, by Europe and by the United States, not just by their governments but by constituent parts of their civil societies.
What caused this delay of nearly four years prior to the Dayton Agreement? A lack of will? Disinterest? Fear? Cynical infighting? Political priorities? Indifference?
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
A Poem, Indufference
By Edward Yashinsky
Fear not your enemies,
for they can only
kill you.
Fear not your friends,
for they can only
betray you.
Fear only
the indifferent,
who permit the killers
and betrayers to walk
safely on earth.
A Review:
The Holocaust and Sociology:
Two of the more Influential Genocide/Holocaust Books
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989 (originally published by Polity Press, 1988); and Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, New York: The Free Press, 1979.
The new Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, and I was deeply moved when in 1996 a large number of my fellow sociologists, including several American Sociological Association (ASA) presidents, took the museum tour. Following a very informative talk by the former Director of the Holocaust Institute, Michael Berenbaum, the group embarked on a journey of discovery.
We moved in silence through the exhibits. Finally, my life as a Holocaust child and my role as a sociologist merged into one. My colleagues would be going through an experience to help them not simply to understand the Holocaust objectively but to understand one of their own colleagues, a child survivor of the Holocaust, as well as other sociologists who were Holocaust survivors.
It is impossible to explain why this was so important to me. It was as if we had been assaulted and finally someone had recognized the crime. It is difficult to describe the need to have others understand our losses and our pain; yet, I must say, how therapeutic it was walking through the corridors with my colleagues, sharing this glimpse into hell.
Why had it taken so long for sociologists to recognize the Holocaust? Immediately after the war, sociologists and social psychologists such as Morris Janowitz, Bruno Bettelheim, Howard Becker, Theodore Abel, Theodor Adorno, Stanley Milgram and others probed such issues as the nature of anti-semitism, obedience, peer-group pressure, Nazi party membership, German voting patterns and other aspects of the Holocaust, though they did not use that word. (The term, coined by Elie Wiesel, emerged in the late 50s.)
But by then, sociology had changed: there was a return to normalcy, to other pursuits in theory and methods; and there was less of a reward structure to pursue research on the Holocaust. Perhaps it was too painful, too unique, too much what Arthur A. Cohen called a tremendum, an unexplainable event in our times, something beyond words. If poets and writers could not deal with the Holocaust, so how could sociologists?
Could it have been a structural reason? Sociology inherently has a difficult time dealing with unique events such as Hiroshima, Vietnam, or the Holocaust. It is a generalizing discipline, very uncomfortable with the idiosyncratic, the singular, the aberrational. Sociology must immediately place such an act into a category, comparable to other similar events. Sociologists are not only uncomfortable with uniqueness; they are conceptually hostile to the exceptional, to non-conforming events. Historians, even psychologists, have no qualms analyzing unique events. Why could not sociologists?
Naturally, even unique events are comparable to others, and, of course, simply to categorize something as unique can often lead to controversy. Sociologists will disagree; they will say that the Holocaust was not unique: look at Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. And they are correct. There have been lesser forms of genocide in the 20th century, but no other genocide in terms of sheer power and sophistication can approach the Holocaust. Clearly, the issue is still controversial, and some readers will disagree.
In part this is because the Holocaust also makes one confront moral issues, and sociology is not comfortable with that either, being a secular, non-moralizing science. For all these reasons, there is little to date in Holocaust literature by sociologists.
Early pioneers in the field, which only began in the late 70s, include Irving Louis Horowitz, Vahakn Dadrian, and Jack Nusan Porter; however, one book written by a relatively unknown sociologist at the time was a trailblazer: Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: The Free Press, 1979). It won the Maclver Award from the American Sociological Association that same year.
Luckily, Helen Fein's monograph did not tackle the "uniqueness" issue but dove into a comparative nation by nation, historical and sociological analysis of how Jews were victimized by the Nazis. She was the first sociologist to attempt such an all-encompassing approach as few have done since. The book was ahead of its time. One of her concepts "the universe of moral obligation" has entered into everyday discourse, often without attribution.
Zygmunt Bauman's book Modernity and the Holocaust, however, received a warmer reception within sociology,a decade later because of sheer timing. It came out in 1988 in England, with an American version in 1989, and it won the 1989 Amalfi European Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences. By that time, Holocaust awareness was widespread. The only weaknesses of the book was its somewhat turgid style (it needs a good editing) and the fact that its author did not come to North America often enough to promote it. Still, it must rank as one of the most influential books in sociology, especially in Europe; and its influence is growing in North America as Holocaust consciousness grows among sociologists.
Bauman saw genocide as society's most extreme and most abhorrent method of "restoring order," doing so by the potency of organizational discipline, the power to silence or to suspend moral reservation through bureaucratic organization, and, in case of the Holocaust, involving the cooperation of millions of "ordinary" people. Even if the functionaries of a complex organization are aware of the ultimate effect of the joint activity of which they are a part, that effect is often too remote to worry them. Remoteness can often be mental rather than geographical. He ties all of these sociological concepts into a discussion of the treatment of Simmel's "stranger," of modernity, morality, and post-modernity.
In conclusion, of interest to sociologists, there are two controversial books sociologists should also look at, even though they will probably reject both of them: these are Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's recent Hitler's Willing Executioners and Steven Katz's The Holocaust in Historical Context. Books such as Helen Fein's Accounting for Genocide, Ervin Staub's The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, and, most importantly, Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust have made a lasting contribution to sociology and beyond. Even though they have their flaws, they are benchmarks along the way in the field of the sociology of genocide and of the Holocaust in particular.
Jack Nusan Porter (University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
A Footnote: Cattle Cars or Freight Cars?
Deportation by rail was one of the central experiences of the Final Solution. At the outset of the program of "resettling" Jews whether westward out of Germany to Gurs, France, or eastward to sundry ghettos the common means of transportation was the 3rd class passenger car. The victims and their allotted baggage were crammed into cars made up of rows of compartments for eight passengers, with some overhead baggage rack space. In most cases these trips were arduous enough: with but few exceptions, no one was allowed out whenever the train stopped; usually no food, not even water was provided; cars went unheated; toilets quickly stopped up; and the more vulnerable deportees died before arrival.
As the deportation system expanded continent-wide, eastward of Jews to ghettos and Death Camps and, westward towards the end of war, from concentration camps, in anticipation of the Soviet advance, the supervisors of transportation turned to other rail modes of mass transportation. The German term used was Güterwagen, literally freight car. Somehow, during the evolution of Holocaust Studies, the term was translated increasingly as cattle car, possibly because of its implications and connotations. The emotive content of the latter is obvious. If the Holocaust had a dehumanizing component, the notion of a cattle car packed far more punch than the more prosaic freight car. By inference, the use of cattle cars implied treatment like beasts hauled to slaughte. Passenger cars were for human beings; cattle cars were for sub-human Jews.
And yet, for the most part, Jews were actually transported in freight cars. These came in two categories, each with two variations: the closed (with a roof) and the open. The former, technically box cars, included cattle cars, recognized by the space between the slats so the animals could breathe. The open cars were either flat beds or enclosed on all four sides. The open category was impractical for obvious security reasons. Thus, virtually all Jews deported by freight train were transported in closed cars. In most of the photographic evidence, these cars were quasi-sealed, that is, lacking the regular ventilation spaces between the slats on all four sides of the car. This explains why so many of the deportees succumbed to sufffocation and why survivors recollected traveling in virtual darkness. The high death-rate to and then from the camps is accounted for in part by the use of these fully enclosed box/freight cars. In the last days of the war, US troops ran across many of these cars, abandoned by their SS escorts and still packed with "passengers," dead and dying.
It may seem a small point; yet it is important. Not only is it more accurate to pinpoint the kind of means of deportation and call it by its correct name, but it avoids the trap of false interpretation by incorrectly insisting upon a term that is, on the whole, factually wrong. To fix and insist upon the term cattle car because it is convenient, because it meshes with a desired dramatic interpretation, is to practice a form of deception and to engage in a kind of a priori reasoning. In this case, one must relinquish what seems an apt term in favor of a less emotional one for the sake of accuracy and integrity. The Holocaust reality was so stark, it needs no adornment or terminological hype.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)