Socialist Worker, UK
Jan 26 2005

Murder by assembly line

Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the greatest crime of the 20th
century. Henry Maitles has written extensively on the Holocaust,
which claimed the lives of members of his family in Lithuania and
Poland. Here he spells out a warning from history

THE LAST century was the bloodiest in history. The Holocaust, the
Nazis’ attempted annihilation of Jews and other `sub-humans’, claimed
12 million victims and was its most brutal act. It was not the only
genocide. There was the attempt by the fledgling Turkish state to
wipe out the Armenians from within its borders in the second decade
of the 20th century. In the last decade there was the slaughter in
Rwanda.

There were other barbarities too – the use of atomic weapons against
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imperialist wars such as in Vietnam, and
appalling conflicts such as in Congo.

Yet the Holocaust rightly evokes for most people the ultimate in
inhumanity. Hence the outrage and revulsion when David Irving and
other Holocaust deniers claim that it was `a detail in history’.
However, it was not just the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but
the thoroughly capitalist nature of the Holocaust – both in its
planning and implementation – that makes it unique.

This shone through in the recent BBC2 series on Auschwitz. One Nazi
officer at the death camp even described it as `murder by assembly
line’, as the most advanced industrial methods were turned to
killing.

In essence, we are dealing with an attempt to strip humans of their
humanity, to justify the idea that they are subhuman as a prelude to
their extermination.

As Primo Levi, the Italian Auschwitz survivor put it: `Imagine now a
man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his
house, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be
a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity
and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.

`He will be a man whose life and death can be lightly decided with no
sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis
of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can
understand the double sense of the term `extermination camp’, and it
is now clear what we seek to express by the phrase `to lie on the
bottom’.’

The capitalist nature of the Holocaust ran through from the
conference that planned the slaughter at Wannsee in January 1942
through to the role of industrialists and the civil servants. Jews
were not only exterminated immediately, but could, particularly in
times of labour shortage, be worked to death as slave labour.

Yet unlike previous barbarities, such as the slave trade, there was
no overriding economic logic to the death camps and the mass murder.

It often appeared irrational – industrial managers using slave labour
complained of how wasteful it was to constantly have to train up new
workers as the SS ensured that Jewish slave labour did not live too
long.

On occasion the transport of Jews ran counter to the war effort. On
D-Day itself, in June 1944, the main worry of the German High
Command, faced with the Allied invasion of Europe, was the transport
of a few hundred Greek Jews to Auschwitz.

Yet as the German army was thrown back on the Eastern and Western
Fronts, the Nazis’ commitment to wiping out the Jews of Europe
remained. The one thing holding the Nazi cadre together was the
belief that as they went down they would take millions of Jews and
other `subhumans’ with them. This has encouraged some to argue that
the Holocaust was some inexplicable outburst of `evil’ with no
connection to the capitalist system.

The connection is there. Germany’s leading engineering firms competed
for the contract to build the most efficient crematoria. However, the
link is not primarily through the complicity of firms such as IG
Farben or IBM in the execution of the Holocaust, but in the way the
Nazis came to power and maintained their rule in alliance with big
business.

Historian Ian Kershaw, who was adviser to the BBC series on
Auschwitz, has described how Germany’s elites hoisted the Nazis into
power in January 1933.

Hitler did not win a majority of seats in the German parliament. For
all the Nazis’ rhetoric of standing up for the `little man’ on the
street, Hitler required the support of the representatives of the
capitalist class to seize power.

They saw in him a force that could destroy working class resistance.
His programme of military expansion, particularly into eastern
Europe, chimed with the historic aims of German imperialism.

The Nazis were the barbaric product of the crisis of capitalism in
Germany between the wars and the Holocaust was a product of their
twisted world outlook which had at its heart the notion that the Jews
were a subhuman enemy. The Holocaust became central to the Nazis,
while the Nazis and the successful outcome of the war were central to
the interests of German capital.

The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 unleashed murder on a vast
scale. The Nazis found they now controlled areas with many millions
of Jews – there were less than half a million within the borders of
Germany itself. Forced Jewish emigration from the lands the Nazis
controlled was no longer an issue. The `solution to the Jewish
problem’ was to murder them.

In the first week of the invasion more Jews were killed by the
Einsatzgruppen (the SS killing squads) than in the previous eight
years of Nazi rule in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and half of
Poland.

Indeed, until mid-1941, there were more communists and socialists in
Nazi concentration camps than Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen moved in behind the German army. One historian
summed up what happened in the city of Bialystok, which had some
50,000 Jews, when the Nazis entered on 27 June 1941: `Dante-esque
scenes took place in these streets. Jews were taken out of the
houses, put against the walls and shot… At least 800 Jews had been
locked in the Great Synagogue before it had been set on fire…the
soldiers were throwing hand grenades into the houses.’

The Einsatzgruppen also attempted to involve indigenous populations
in doing their killing. Often they were successful and many of those
accused of war crimes were Latvian, Lithuanian or Ukranian.

In other places, though, the Nazis couldn’t make the locals into
murderers. For example, a report prepared in October 1941 complained
that Einsatzgruppen A operating in Estonia could not `provoke
spontaneous anti-Jewish demonstrations with ensuing pogroms’ because
the population in their area lacked `sufficient enlightenment’ to
murder the Jews.

The need to kill Jews more efficiently and quickly, and the effects
of face to face slaughter on the German soldiers, persuaded the Nazi
leadership that a more impersonal method of slaughter was preferable.

The Nazis went to great lengths to keep the extermination camps
secret from both the Jews and the German population. The Allies did
get to know about the death camps. But Allied leaders told
delegations asking them to bomb the railway into Auschwitz and the
crematoria blocks that they had no proof of mass murder. Saving the
Jews of Europe was not an Allied war aim.

We should remember all this as we commemorate the Holocaust this
week. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself
stop the rise of fascism in the 21st century. But it does make the
Nazis’ job harder, which is why BNP leader Nick Griffin and the rest
go to such lengths to deny it. The Holocaust also stands as a
terrible warning of the barbaric forces capitalism can unleash when
it goes into a deep crisis and its existence is at stake.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress