For the benefit of people who recognize processes, it is important to bring some data precisely from the hundred years before the Holocaust, in order to understand that what happened in Germany resembled nowhere else. There were too many red flags. One of the great questions about the Holocaust is whether it was a unique case, terrible in its cruelty, that could only have emerged from the German people, or an event that could happen to any nation through one “process” or another.
Films like ‘The Wave’, or books like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men,” want us to believe the second possibility — that in fact a little Nazi hides inside each of us, ready to burst out under the right conditions. Despite the educational message this carries, the historical data show that the German people in the centuries before the Holocaust resembled nothing else we know:
German cruelty
This was not barbaric cruelty in the heat of war or out of a momentary lust for revenge, but systematic cruelty that came down from the leaders at the top and was carried out, without too many qualms, by entirely “ordinary” Germans as well. The Germans committed genocide 35 years before the Holocaust: the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in Namibia between 1904 and 1907. It included extreme starvation, imprisonment in concentration camps, deadly forced labor, the poisoning of water wells and mass slaughter — the same methods that would later be applied to the Jewish people. The Germans murdered men, women and children, and annihilated 80% of the tribes’ people. It was a systematic massacre that sought to wipe them out completely. On October 4, 1904, von Trotha wrote to the chief of the general staff: “I believe that the nation (the Herero and Nama tribes) must be destroyed as a nation… I think it is better for the nation to disappear entirely than to infect our soldiers.”
German cruelty had been observed even earlier, including in leaders considered “enlightened.” When Otto von Bismarck, the unifier of Germany and founder of the German Empire, laid siege to Paris in 1870, his Jewish aide Ludwig Bamberger warned him that if they kept besieging the city, “the starving women and children will come out beyond the lines to confront us.” Bismarck replied: “Then we will have to shoot them.” One of the officers present remarked that the soldiers might refuse to obey such an order. “Then,” answered Bismarck, “we will have to shoot the soldiers too” (from ‘A German Requiem’, essential reading for understanding the German background to the Holocaust, page 193. All the pages cited later in this post are also from A German Requiem).
The German treatment of human beings as cattle.
Guess which period the following quote is from:
“The refugees were locked in sealed trains for days on end and were allowed out only at delousing stations. In Hamburg they waited for the ships under quarantine conditions” … “They led us like herds of sheep, loaded us into railcars and drove us from place to place like cattle… Germans in white aprons screamed orders, always accompanied by ‘schnell, schnell!’ The bewildered passengers obeyed the orders like submissive children, only wondering now and then what their fate would be” (page 272).
The quote is about refugees from Russia who passed through Germany in 1905. That was how Germany treated refugees who tried to pass through its territory, 40 years before the Holocaust.
The Germans were amenable to tyranny.
German culture had a tendency to be ruled by power-hungry, charismatic leaders. Hitler was not a tyrant who came to power by accident. The Germans were not a hapless people that a cruel tyrant happened to seize and, as it were, hypnotize into committing slaughter (as the film The Wave would have it…). The Germans did not merely submit under Hitler — they were positively waiting for a leader like him. Is it a coincidence that the advanced Germans were the last to achieve true democracy? After the Holocaust, the first president of West Germany, Theodor Heuss, lamented the Germans’ historical flaw: they tried, but never quite managed, to achieve democracy on their own. Instead they waited for the Allies to impose it on them in 1949 (page 183). Ludwig Bamberger, Bismarck’s aide, wrote that “submissiveness is a uniquely German trait.”
The worship of power and war
The Germans worshipped power, worshipped war. Bismarck said that war is the natural state of humanity (page 193). Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet, came to know the bloodthirsty German nature, and wrote as early as 1834 that one should not be fooled by German culture, which appears advanced and flourishing. What he wrote, about a hundred years before the Holocaust, is chilling and almost prophetic. One can see how someone who knew the German character well could sense that “incidents” like the Holocaust were only a matter of time where the German people were concerned:
“Beware!… In Germany a drama will unfold beside which the French Revolution will seem a harmless idyll. Christianity suppressed the militaristic ardor of the Germans for a time but did not destroy it: as soon as the restraining talisman breaks, the savagery will rise again… the terrible fury of which Nordic poets sing and speak… The ancient stone gods will rise from the dust and wash a thousand years’ dust from their eyes. Thor will stride forth with his great hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals… The German thunder… rolls slowly, but come it will. And when you hear it roar, as it has never roared before, know that it will reach its goal.” (Heinrich Heine, 1834).
And all this without even mentioning the uniqueness of German antisemitism and how deep it ran within the culture over the centuries preceding the Holocaust. We will devote a separate article to that.
There are many lessons to learn from the Holocaust, but that is not the subject of this post. We must not be complacent toward evil; we must stand clearly against it, and criticizing improper deeds is more than legitimate. But under no circumstances should anything be compared to what the Germans inflicted on humanity in general and on the Jews in particular. That the Holocaust itself is a historical event without equal is by now quite clear. What is perhaps less clear, and more important to emphasize, is precisely the unique background of the German people in the decades that preceded the Holocaust. A background like no other.
