The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning [Paperback]

Although the prose is uninspiring, this is nevertheless a superbly organized and information-rich book. It sets out to understand the meaning of the European Holocaust by answering perhaps the 15 to 20 most important questions ever raised about it. And rather surprisingly, it cuts straight to the chase and proceeds systematically to providing answers to them all. Thus overall it is well organized, ambitious, thorough and successful. Despite the sensitivity of the subject matter, the author is not captured by "holocaust mania." And in this regard, perhaps the supreme accolade to his scholarship is that even though he is a Jew, he has no axes to grind, nor any sacred cows to either "gore" or "protect." He allows the chips to fall where they may, and that is a strong endorsement of his integrity and credibility as a journalist and writer.

For many reasons expressed in the book I agree with the author that the European Holocaust should not just be restricted only to the "progressive bureaucratization" of the mechanized killing of Jews during the Second World War. But instead must remain above and beyond mere victimhood. As he so carefully notes, it must remain the central reference point, the transcendent and universal metaphor (and I would add, measuring stick) for our humanity as we continue to try to grapple with the scourges of racism, religious sectarianism, inter-tribalism, international conflict and international terrorism. As heinous and as aberrant as Hitler's act of "collective managerial murder" was, it still remains just another uncomfortable symbol of the larger story of human hatred, racial prejudice and bigotry of which our world, in the generations since WW-II, has shown itself utterly incapable of surmounting.

Here the most sobering of all the facts to have emerged in the aftermath of the great war is that the author has listed no less than six additional confirmed cases (and another eighteen suspected cases) of genocide that have occurred on "our watch." Based on this embarrassing evidence alone, we obviously have not yet been very vigilant, nor have we properly learned the lessons of the European Holocaust. And based on a careful reading of this book, I believe that the most dramatic evidence pointing to this fact is not to be found in the author's embarrassingly long list of newly confirmed instances of genocide, but in the courage of the Israeli officers, who, refusing to have their humanity further sullied, pleaded "no mas," and invoked their own Jewish history of suffering as the reason for refusing to take up positions as "occupiers of Palestinian territory."

It is scary to have to come to the realization that the atrocities occurring in the occupied territories each day and seen throughout the world on national TV, has been concocted in the heads of decision makers who were themselves victims of Hitler's industry of death? If there is higher irony in this world than that, then I do not care to know what it is?

Understanding the Meaning of the European Holocaust

There are many ways to understand the meaning of the European Holocaust. One that is explored far too infrequently but which is analyzed carefully in this book lies in the difference between society's reaction to ordinary murder, which is correctly seen as an individual criminal act, and genocide, which, more often than not is a "state sanctioned" and "culturally approved" crime of collective homicide and worse. In the case of individual murder, the criminal is pursued relentlessly without a statute of limitations until he is brought before the bar of justice. The moral issues always being crystal clear: the criminal must face the consequences of his actions. His conviction and sentence is testament to his need to assume personal responsibility for his actions. However, in the case of genocide (usually a collective, societally condoned crime), moral murkiness and fuzziness begins to set in. Perpetrators are rarely identified clearly, or pursued; shame and guilt are ever present but always repressed, criminal responsibility is diffuse, atrocities are turned away from, minimized and rationalized. There is a statue of limitations on the acts committed, the local laws must be parsed, national sovereignty and religious sensitivities must be respected, or the UN or the International Criminal courts must be consulted: In short, as was the case with the Jews of Poland, and as is the case in the Sudan today, everything trumps the human rights of the victim.

Clearly genocide is a cultural thing. Unlike individual murder, in the case of collective murder, moral codes and imperatives become cloudy. Cultural gravity, it seems always seeks its own level. It loves ambiguity and always rewards timidity, cultural prejudices, conformity, moral cowardice, excuse making and bureaucratic inertia. Summarized and said somewhat differently, genocide is just ordinary murder raised to the collective level, that is to say, genocide is just murder with a collectivist anatomy and backbone, which is to say none at all. At its deepest level (the psychological), it is a statement about how the human condition works when it has the protective shield of numbers circled around it. It is a statement about how greed, envy and especially racial prejudice always seem to be the motive forces hidden behind the screen that is ever-propelling our humanity toward greater evil.

This all too familiar tableau, this ever-pregnant set of parameters - preset, lock and loaded to go; cocked and waiting to be actualized -- is a human motif that unfortunately Hitler understood all too well. His genius it seems was to know how (and when) to "pull the trigger:" how to play the emotional heartstrings and minds of the German people (the Volk) until they submitted their will to his nationalistic and criminal charms. Whenever Hitler uttered a sentence that contained the word "Jew" and any negative predicate, the German people were not just charmed, but snapped to attention.

Hitler, and the whole line of petty nationalistic demagogues to follow, have been mere catalysts for activating this latent human weakness. In Germany, anti-Semitism had been laying fallow, festering as normalized respectable German culture (but in fact was normalized latent criminality) for more than a thousand years. Sadly, the twenty or so candidates for genocide since WW-II, in one stage of development or another, have acted as Hitler did, as triggers to activate the latent cultural dimension of racial hatred, greed, envy, religious dissension, sense of racial superiority and entitlements, and self-interests; and doing so in such a way that it shields the individual from being responsible for the consequences of his own genocidal actions. Jackbooted cliques of demagogues are always on the prowl looking for vulnerabilities in the cultural armor of any nation. In this regard, the U.S. is as ripe as any nation on earth for a return of an Adolph Hitler. The sad truth is that in our culture, there is no penalty for having demagogues constantly on the prowl. Sadly, we have somehow come to confuse the vitriol, chest-beating and testosterone of demagogues as "the will of the people?" [Go figure?]

The reason this formula has worked so well in the past and promises to continue doing so in the future is that our humanity (just as was the case with Nazi Germany seventy years ago) apparently is a great deal more morally fragile than we might wish to admit. While we imagine ourselves as moral giants, history keeps telling us over and over again (look at the Catholic pedophilia scandal as just one case in point) that we are closer to being moral pygmies. Emotionally, we live, not with the angels, or even in the trees, but almost always well below ground. From the tunnels in our mole holes that we call culture, we scavenge around on a daily moral diet of fear, envy, greed, racial hatred, selfishness, and racial entitlements. Yet, despite this, we keep telling ourselves that we soar with the angels, that we are made in the image of, and are next to the gods.

We are not.

The list of Holocausts since WW-II suggests that modern man is animated by feelings that are frankly morally reprehensible and very frightening. Except for lip service, our moral codes tend towards cultural relativity and our ethics (even the religious ones as the most recent Pope and Osama bin Ladin have demonstrated) are always situationally negotiable. It seems that all we really strive to do is what the Osama bin Ladin's version of Islam and Pope Benedict's version of Catholicism is doing today: to use our institutions and our freedoms to carve out our own kind of "criminal normality" and then refer to it as ideological, religious or racial purity. We cannot continue to fool ourselves and pretend that this tip of the proverbial iceberg is all there is. Unfortunately it is also the ground truth of contemporary humanity.

Despite all this, there is one clear lesson from the European experience that the book takes note of in the last chapter. It was the overall message of the Nuremberg Trial: that the individual cannot forever evade personal responsibility by hiding behind the alibi: "the state made be do it," or by giving over his responsibilities to a Fuhrer, even though this still remains the most commonly heard refrain of those found guilty of collective crimes. Everyone (and all of our institutions and political parties) seems to be striving towards a kind of criminal normality through ideological, racial or religious purity, one that allows the individual above all else to escape responsibility for his own debased thoughts and emotions. As a result, the best government, these days, seems to be that which allows us to remain "coded, crypto-citizens," so that during daylight we can pretend to be normal moral and respectable citizens. Yet when the spotlight is turned away from our faces to the darkness in our hearts, there is nothing to be found there but pretense and dust. We have become little more than shells in which to hide from the exposure of light, our deepest and most debased secrets: our racial prejudices, our feelings of racial superiority, our mindless pursuit of greed, our false piety. We are thus forced to live both underground and behind a screen of false consciousness that makes us continuously vulnerable to leaders who will guide us to the next genocide.
A great read and an invaluable reference to macro ideas on genocide. Five stars.

Thoroughly researched book, includes history of the Jews from the beginning. Best book of its type that I've ever read. Ronnie Landau puts it all together.

but still essential. i wouldn't want to examine it as a narrative; landau's essentially offering facts and tying them together chronologically- but as a one-volume overview of the Holocaust, it works wonderfully- and tragically. by detaching the stories from the context of the German political environment of the time, landau underscores exactly how systemic the process was. one day, the Jews lost their bench-sitting privileges; the next, they lost their radios; the next, they lost their ability to own businesses; and on and on, until the reader is brought to the camps, there to meet the horrors firsthand and to see, straightforwardly and without pretense, the nature of the operations. this is not the book to pick up if you're looking for a readable holocaust summary. but does such an event warrant a summary? i can't think of one right now, save, perhaps, "the destruction of the european jews." but that's hardly "readable."

my best bet for Holocaust study? read this for an overview, along with "the destruction..."; read anne frank, of course, and etty hillesum for the personal experience- and fit victor klemperer into the mix if you have time; he gives a sense of what was being experienced by a fully-formed adult during that time; read "the theory and practice of hell" for the technical aspects of the camps; read "why did the heavens not darken?" (flawed yet worthy) for a modern philosophical consideration of the whole dark mass, along with, of course, "hitler's willing executioners" (again, flawed, and much more insidiously so) and its refutation, "a nation on trial"; read "the nazis- a pictorial history" for photos that will remind you that this happened on days much like this one; and read "truth and lamentation", if it's still available, for a shot at what those in the ghettos and the slums and the camps were doing while they weren't being slaughtered.

these titles all imply that this subject can't be gently summed up. which is the way it should be.