Dear Colleague,

In his review essay on A Century of Genocide, Murray Schwartz focuses on the “primacy of race.” From this idea of race, many other terms follow, including “lives unfit to live,” “elimination,” “purification,” etc. The Nazis, Schwartz says, sought “perfection” that could be attained only through “perpetual war against lesser races.” Unrestrained violence grew out of “racial categorization.”

However, what precisely did “race” mean to Nazi ideologues such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels—whose ideas generated mass murder? Contrary to popular conceptions, there is no evidence that these men associated race with physical characteristics. Rather, the “Jewish race” was conceived in terms of certain psychological characteristics that were believed to be inborn.

The essence of the “Aryan,” according to Hitler (see the LSS Newsletter of January 2), was the extent of his willingness to sacrifice for the community. The Aryan was “not greatest in his mental abilities” (Mein Kampf, 1925), but in his self-sacrificing will to “give his personal labor and if necessary his own life for others.”

The Jew, by contrast, Hitler said, represented the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.” Whereas the Aryan “willingly sacrificed himself for the community,” Jews lacked the “most essential requirement for a cultured people, the ‘idealistic attitude.’” What characterized Jews was the “absolute absence of all sense of sacrifice.”

Key to understanding the genocidal process, Schwartz suggests, is the idea of “the individual.” Genocidal regimes insist that “individuality must be eliminated.” Hitler’s Official Programme (1920) put forth the Nazis’ central complaint: “The leaders of our public life all worship the same god—Individualism. Personal interest is the sole incentive.” The central plank of the Nazi program was “The Common Interest before Self Interest.”

The Nazis considered individualism a “sin” because it was conceived as opposing devotion to the community—willingness to sacrifice. For Hitler, the Jews’ tendency toward “selfish individualism,” meant they were incapable of assimilating into a national community.

Since Hitler believed that willingness to sacrifice was the “first premise for every truly human community,” Jews were therefore inferior—inhuman—because they lacked this capacity for sacrifice. According to Hitler, the Jewish inability to “renounce putting forward personal opinions and interests” and to “sacrifice both in favor of the large group” was a biologically given character trait.

The following judgment by the Cologne Labor Court (January 21, 1941) denied the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation (in Noakes & Pridham, 2001):

The precondition for the claim to a vacation—membership of the plant community—does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency, which is geared to forwarding his personal interests and securing economic advantages.

This crucial passage states that—because of the Jew’s proclivity toward pursuing personal interests and economic advantages (which was a “racial tendency”)—they could not be a member of the community.

Hitler called Jews the “ferment of decomposition” in peoples. Since the Jew “destroys and must destroy,” Hitler said, it was “beside the point whether the individual Jew is ‘decent’ or not.” In himself he “carries those characteristics which Nature has given him.”

According to Hitler, the Jew could not be other than who he was—because he possessed certain characteristics that Nature had given him. By virtue of his race—his biologically given nature—the Jew “lacked completely a conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community.”

Nazi scholarship declared that the peculiar characteristic of Judaism was its “hostility to human society” (Weinreich, 1999) — which is why there could be “no solution to the Jewish question.” A true understanding of Jews and Judaism insisted on their “total annihilation.”

Schwartz analyzes the Cambodian genocide, which, he says, “exceeded even Nazi Germany and their Chinese predecessors in the destruction of traditional forms of life.” He cites a survivor, Rithy Panh, writing in The Elimination (2013) about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison and torture house:

Everything was subordinated to the Angkar, the mysterious, all-powerful “Organization.” I know of no other example in history of such dominion, of a sovereignty almost abstract by virtue of being absolute. In that world, I’m not an individual. I have no freedom, no thoughts, no origin, no inheritance, no rights: I have no more body. All I have is a duty, namely to dissolve myself in the Organization.

The phrase “dissolve oneself in the Organization” contains the essence of totalitarianism. Hitler explained to his German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Hitler aspired to throw men into the “great melting pot, the nation,” so that they could be “welded one to another.”

People who are melted together—welded to one another—naturally lose their individuality and freedom. The totalitarian dream conceives of human beings as “cells” that are capable of uniting in order to create a single, omnipotent body (politic).

Working to build up his Nazi state, Hitler believed the German people had been won over by the “eternal national and social ideal” he put forth—persuading them to “subordinate their own interests to the interest of the whole society.” Nonetheless, Hitler said, there were still a few “incurables” who did not understand “the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.”

Jews specifically, for Hitler, symbolized people who were “incurable”: unable to assimilate into a national community. Jews, according to Hitler—in any society—represented a “force of disintegration” acting to tear nations apart. By virtue of their biologically given nature, Jews caused nations to “break into pieces.”

“Racism,” it turns out, had little to do with physical characteristics . Rather, Nazi racism was a complex psychological—even metaphysical—conception. Jews represented an idea in the mind of Hitler and other Nazis, symbolizing individualism and separation—tendencies acting to destroy national unity.

Jews, according to National Socialism, did not have the capacity to abandon individuality in order to fuse with a national community. The Jewish inability to bind to a body politic, Hitler believed, was biologically given—which is why there could be no “solution to the Jewish problem” other than the Final Solution.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com