Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

particularly onerous and humiliating physical work. Similarly they organized their

policies on nutrition and housing, the occupation of conquered territory, and other

policy areas according to racially determined hierarchies and racially determined

conceptual approaches in which anti-Semitism always played a major role.

Introduction

5

Finally the overall political context changed with time, and during the war did so

with ever-increasing speed. Nazi Judenpolitik thus took on quite different forms in

different phases of the progress of the ‘Third Reich’. For tactical reasons it was

modified, retracted, or accelerated; at critical points it developed erratically, disjoint-edly, and in sequences of action that developed their own internal dynamics. This

kind of development cannot be fully grasped by a conventional model of understand-

ing political decision-making (which stresses the formulation of political goals, the

process of decision-making itself, and the implementation of those decisions). The

implementation of Judenpolitik took on its own dynamic such that decision-making

and even the formulation of political aims were subsumed within it.

Judenpolitik was subject to sudden shifts; it developed contradictorily, within a

complex series of linkages and without any form of precedent. It could not be

implemented by people who were merely following orders but required active

protagonists who could operate on their own initiative and understand intuitively

what the leadership required of them. Judenpolitik is characterized by the rela-

tively large scope afforded to the activities of those who put it into practice. This

system could only function if the most important aspects of Judenpolitik com-

manded a consensus amongst those involved with it. It would only function if it

was actively supported by at least part of the population, the active adherents of

National Socialism. It was thus necessary to be able to communicate the aims and

mechanisms of Judenpolitik to the public at all times and with varying degrees of

openness. Judenpolitik was thus publicly disseminated, debated, and legitimated—

albeit often in a disguised manner. 21

What seems to me to be crucial to any analysis of this complex phenomenon is

the fact that Judenpolitik was central to the whole National Socialist movement,

indeed that the very aims, the distinctiveness, and the uniqueness of National

Socialism as a historical phenomenon were determined by its Judenpolitik. This

can be clarified in a number of ways.

The basic aim of the Nazi movement was a racially homogeneous national

community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the potential for creative energy inher-

ent in the German people could at last come to fruition and where the German

people could achieve full self-realization. The Nazi view was that the harmony of

the national community to which they aspired would permit the resolution of

virtually all the major problems of their age, whether they were aspects of foreign

or domestic policy, social, economic, or cultural in nature. It was not possible to

establish such a racially homogeneous community because it was based on

erroneous beliefs about the division of humanity into different ‘races’, so Nazi

racism could only operate negatively: via negative measures, via discrimination,

exclusion, elimination, via the removal of alien elements—in which process, for

historical reasons, anti-Jewish measures took on a central role. In the course of

this process of exclusion the NSDAP was supposed to succeed in bringing under

its control those areas of life that needed to be ‘made Jew-free’ (entjudet). Thus for

6

Introduction

the Nazis anti-Semitic policies became the key to gaining control first over

German society and later over almost the whole of Europe. Their anti-Semitic

ideology was not a mere Weltanschauung, a hotchpotch of aberrant and perverse

ideas, but the very basis of the Nazis’ claims for total domination.

This means, I believe, that we should abandon the notion that it is historically

meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a

single decision that led to the ‘Final Solution’. This approach is pointless not only

because the debate on the ‘Final Solution’ has evidently reached the limits of what

is provable but above all because any attempt to identify a decision taken at a

single moment in time runs counter to the extreme complexity of the processes

that were in fact taking place. The truth is that those with political responsibility

propelled forward, step by step, a highly complicated decision-making process in

which a series of points where it was escalated can be identified.

This has a number of consequences for a depiction of the genesis of the ‘Final

Solution’. First, if we abandon the model that sees a single decision as the trigger

for the murder of the European Jews and if we advance beyond the notion of a

cumulative process of radicalization that had got out of control and could no

longer be steered by anyone, then the various phases in Nazi Judenpolitik take on

new significance. New perspectives are revealed that show the years 1939 to 1941

as a phase in which the National Socialist regime was already considering

genocidal projects against the Jews that appear all the more sinister in the light

of the racially motivated programmes of mass murder that were already been

carried out against the Polish population and the ‘congenitally ill’. It also becomes

clearer how in the period from spring 1942 onwards the lives of several million

Jewish people depended on how the Nazis’ Judenpolitik developed. Large Jewish

communities could be saved (as they were in France, Italy, Denmark, Old

Romania, and Bulgaria) or they were lost (as in Hungary and Greece). Bitter

conflicts were also fought over the fate of Jewish forced labour groups. It needs to

be made clear that even after the Europe-wide ‘Final Solution’ had been initiated

the continuing development of Judenpolitik depended on a chain of decisions and

did not merely consist in the ‘implementation’ of a single decision that had

already been taken.

However, when we treat the period 1939 to 1945 as one in which a series of

decisions regarding Judenpolitik were being taken rather than restricting our

analysis to a ‘decision-making period’ of a few months, then we also need to

take the years 1933 to 1939 into consideration as a preparatory period for the phase

in which the annihilation of the Jews took place. In the years preceding the war the

institutions were created that were to organize the genocide during the war, and

this was the period in which Judenpolitik was developed and radicalized and in

which the regime learned how to deploy this new field of politics in a variety of

ways for its own