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A Question of Justice
Russell McNeil
March 9, 1995
Why are we studying the holocaust? Is it because it coloured
within the framework of the biggest cataclysm in human history (Table
I). Sixty one countries representing three quarters of the world
population contributed 110 million combatants in a struggle which over
six years claimed 60 million lives, cost over $1 trillion dollars, and
altered the geopolitical landscape of the globe as never before. The
First War involved half as many combatants, claimed a third as many
lives, and cost a fifth as much in economic terms
Table I
Direct War Losses
Country Military Civilian
USSR 13,000,000 7,000,000
China 3,500,000 10,000,000
Germany 3,500,000 3,800,000
Poland 120,000 5,300,000
Japan 1,700,000 380,000
Yugoslavia 300,000 1,300,000
Romania 200,000 465,000
France 250,000 360,000
British Empire 410,000 60,000
Italy 330,000 80,000
Hungary 120,000 280,000
Czechoslovakia 10,000 330,000
United States 407,000 -
Canada 42,000 -
Totals 24,000,000 30,000,00
1. Scale
A lot of folks died and terrible things happened. Is that reason
enough to look at this? Maybe it is because we have here a vivid
example of what can happen when a lot of really nasty blood thirsty
criminal types are given the chance to run the world their way: nasty
little men like Eichmann under the sway of tyrannical brutes like
Himmler, Hitler, and Hess (Table II).
Another set of statistics. These are the five to six million indirect
fatalities that defined the holocaust. Although 90 to 97 percent were
Jews, Jews were not the only target. Estimates of the number of
gypsies exterminated range from 200,000 to 500,000. Thousands of
Soviet prisoners of War were also gassed in the camps along with an
unknown number of male homosexuals, habitual criminals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, vagrants, and habitual criminals.
We've labeled this pogrom, the holocaust. Yet, the it wasn't the
first instance of genocide in recorded history. It wasn't even the first in
this century. Between 1915 and 1923, up to 1.5 million Armenians were
driven from their homes or massacred by the Turkish government. In
1975 the Khmer Rouge, a despotic regime, took over Cambodia and
brutalized its people. Over a four period 3 million Cambodians were
systematically executed. Closer to the present events in Bosnia and
Rwanda show that human capacity for genocidal behaviour has not
been eradicated
Table II
Indirect War Losses (Genocide)
German Reich (boundaries of 1938) 130,000 125,000
Austria 58,000 65,000
Belgium 26,000
Belgium & Luxembourg 24,700
Bulgaria 7,000
Czechoslovakia 245,000 277,000
France 64,000 83,000
Greece 58,000 65,000
Hungary & Carpatho-Ukraine 300,000 402,000
Italy 8,000 7,500
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia 200,000
Luxembourg 3,000
Netherlands 101,800 106,000
Norway 677 760
Poland (boundaries of 1939) 2,700,000
Polish-Soviet area 4,565,000
Romania 220,000 40,000
USSR (boundaries prior to 1939) 800,000
Yugoslavia 54,000 60,000
-------------------
4,971,177 5,825,250
Note: Between 200,000 and 500,000 Gypsies and an
unknown number of homosexuals were also exterminated
at the death camps
Why then the holocaust. Why not Bosnia, or Armenia, or
Rwanda or Cambodia?
2. Personal Responsibility
Perhaps it has something to do with the particular history of the
Jews and our unique relationship to the Jew within the context of the
Judeo-Christian tradition? Perhaps we are especially interested in this
instance because at some deep level we feel more culpable for this
than for other atrocities. Many express anger for "flogging this dead
horse." It's an interesting response. The case for paying more attention
to other atrocities is sound. But the intensity of the criticism one hears
for focusing our attention on this one merits some reflection too.
The passage of times can dim cultural memory. I have two very
short off air recordings of English language German radio propaganda
broadcasts directed to North America during the war. I want to share
them with you to give a flavor of the nature of the official public rhetoric
emanating from Germany during this era. Bear in mind that this is the
kind of language Germany wanted the world to hear. The first clip is
from a man code named Paul revere who's musing were broadcast
every day. The second is from an American defector Robert Best who
was campaigning for congress as a write in candidate. His platform --
excuse my language -- was to rid America of the "kike curse."
[two short audio clips; "Paul Revere," and "Robert Best"]
Anti-Semitism does have a long history in our culture. In the
ancient Roman Empire, the devotion of Jews to their religion and
special forms of worship was used as a pretext for political
discrimination against them, and very few Jews were admitted to
Roman citizenship. Since the 4th century AD (and possibly before),
Jews have been regarded as the killers of Jesus Christ.
With the Enlightenment, increasing separation of church and
state, and the rise of modern nation-states, Jews experienced less
religious and economic persecution and were gradually integrated into
the economic and political order; however, acceptance was superficial
and ran in cycles, depending on economic and social conditions.
In Germany, the process of Jewish emancipation was completed
with the formation of the German Empire in 1871. Although legal
reforms put an end to discrimination on religious grounds, racist
hostility grew.
Opposition to the Jews was more open in Eastern Europe. The
persecution of Jews there was climaxed by a series of organized
massacres, or pogroms, that began in 1881. Some of the worst
outbreaks occurred in 1906 after the unsuccessful 1905 revolution in
Russia. The pogroms resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Jews
and the looting and destruction of their property. These pogroms were
justified by a notorious forgery known as the "Protocols of the Elders of
Zion," which purported to reveal details of an international Jewish
conspiracy to dominate the world. Such deliberate distortions were also
used during the pogrom after the 1917 revolution, which claimed
hundreds of thousands of victims.
Similar anti-Semitic propaganda was also circulated in the
United States, A notable event was the temporary embracing of anti-
Semitism by Henry Ford, who reprinted the discredited Protocols of the
Elders of Zion in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. Ford later
apologized for this action.
And we can't forget that it wasn't until the Second Vatican
Council in 1962 that the Roman Catholic Church publicly stopped
blaming Jews for the death of Christ.
3. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
Another thought. A darker one. In a strange twisted way it is
possible to argue that the holocaust is a product of the enlightenment!
It seems a contradiction in terms. How can enlightened thinking have a
dark side? Reason and science were the enlightenment's crowning
achievements. But, the racial theories the Nazi's used to justify this
genocide--as Anne shared with us--were grounded in science. Bad
science perhaps. But science nonetheless. The theories were
developed through French diplomat and social philosopher Gobineau
and the German philosopher and economist Karl Duhring. They were
the Phillippe Rushtons of their day.
We saw how de Tocqueville railed against these theories as
unprovable and unhelpful. Yet they were applied in the interests of
"social hygiene" by the Nazis to "cleanse" the human condition.
Science dictated duty. The Jewish Question was resolved by science.
Jews would be given "special treatment (Table III).
Table I (Summary of Special Treatment)
Kulmhof 150,000
Belzec 600,000
Sobidor 250,000
Treblinka 750,000
Lublin 50,000
Auschwitz 1,000,000 (1,600,000?)
Shootings 1,400,000
Ghettos 600,000
Totals 4,800,000 (5,400,000?
And it was carried out with scientific precision. Auschwitz, near
Krakow, was the largest death camp. Prisoners there were carefully
segregated and clearly identified. The yellow star of David identified
the Jew. Other inmates wore colored inverted triangles. Political
prisoners wore red; habitual criminals green; Jehovah's Witnesses
purple; vagrants black; and male homosexuals pink.
At peak efficiency Auschwitz's crematoria has the capacity to
handle 12,000 corpses a day or over 4 million per year. The figures
here indicate the camps capacity was not fully utilized. Unlike the other
camps which relied mainly on carbon monoxide, Auschwitz used quick-
working hydrogen cyanide for the gassings. The gassings were
perfected as an art. Two German firms, Tesch and Degesch, produced
Zyklone-B gas after they acquired the patent from Farben. Tesch
supplied two tons a month, and Degesch three quarters of a ton.
Zyklon-B is a powerful insecticide which serves as a carrier for the gas
Hydrocyanic acid, or HCN. HCN was used in execution gas chambers
in the US as early as 1920. About 300 ppm will kill people in fifteen
minutes or so according to "CRC handbook of Chemistry and Physics."
The scientific attitude towards the exercise of the extermination
policy at Auschwitz expressed itself too in the free acceptance of the
German scientific community towards using Jewish subjects in a variety
of medical experiments.
Several of the seventy or more medical-research projects
conducted by the Nazis were conducted at Auschwitz. These projects
involved experiments conducted with human beings against their will.
and at least seven thousand were so treated. About two hundred
German medical doctors were involved in the concentration camp
experiments. They maintained close professional ties with the German
medical establishment, and used the universities and research
institutes in Germany and Austria in their work.
There were three broad classes of experiments. The German
Air Force conducted experiments dealing with survival and rescue,
including research into the effects of high altitude, freezing
temperatures, and the ingestion of sea water.
Medical treatment constituted a second class, and involved
research into the treatment of battle injuries, gas attacks, and the
formulation of immunization compounds to treat contagious and
epidemic diseases.
Finally, there were racial experiments, including research into
dwarfs and twins, serological research, and skeletal examination.
Professor Carl Clauberg injected chemical substances into wombs
during normal gynecological examinations. Thousands of Jewish and
Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. The injections totally
destroyed the lining membrane of the womb and seriously damaged
the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin
to test the effectiveness of the method.
The so called "Angel of Death" Joseph Mengele promoted
medical experimentation on inmates, especially dwarfs and twins. He is
said to have supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children
were sewn together to create Siamese twins; the hands of the children
became badly infected where the veins had been connected.
Mengele's purpose, was to establish the genetic cause for the birth of
twins, in order to facilitate the formulation of a program for doubling the
birthrate of the 'Aryan' race. The experiments on twins affected 180
persons, adults and children.
Dr. Horst Schumann's work, "on the influence of X-rays on
human genital glands" done at Auschwitz involved forcible sterilization
of men and women who were positioned repeatedly for several minutes
between two x-ray machines aimed at their sexual organs. Most
subjects died or were gassed immediately because the radiation burns
from which they suffered rendered them unfit for work. Men's testicles
were removed and sent to Breslau for histopathological examination.
And so the science went.
4. Banality
Then of course is the question of banality. Banality means
commonplace, trite, uninteresting. The injustice that this case study
illuminated was not perpetrated by monsters and madman. That has
always been a convenient picture in explaining "evil." Evil deeds must
be matched with evil beings. But it isn't at all clear anymore how this all
works. Eichmann was not the nasty little man our psyche demanded.
He wasn't deranged. His human faults weren't all that unusual.
The old picture of "evil" is turned on its head here. And, we find
that deeply troubling. I became personally aware that there was
something wrong with this picture after a summer's work as a Rohr
Schlosser Helfer (pipe fitter's mate) at Kieler Howaltswerke in Northern
Germany in 1967. The company had built U Boats during the war.
Many of the men I worked with had worked there during the war, and
had served in the armed forces. Some has been prisoners of war. The
exasperation for me from this experience was unsettling. "Warum?," I
would ask. "Why?" How could it happen?
It was plain to me that I was surrounded by people who had
been raised in a magnificent cultural milieu. More unsettling was their
take on me. I and other young Canadians and Americans were seen by
them as a bit rough on the edges -- this was the 60's -- but, I was
embraced as a cultural cousin. I was not an "other." They were not an
"enemy." Our cultural traditions converged. It felt like "home." I was
nicknamed "rot," inhaled horrible German cigarettes, guzzeled good
beer, listened to fine music, and very quickly developed an incurable
taste for blackbread, sauerkraut and Bratwurst.
Some part of my consciousness had been deceived. It wasn't
"supposed to be that way.
I've been trying to process this experience for the past 28 years.
The best I've been able to do has been the realization, a long time in
coming, that the fraternity extended to me by my German cousins must
be reciprocal. We were more alike than we were different.
What that means is sobering. It could have been reversed. The
thought experiment isn't difficult to perform. The right combination of
historical precedents and accidents could just as easily have emerged
here as there. Tyranny -- if it was tyranny -- in some form could have
transformed this milieu into something "other" than what we know now.
If it had happened here, if it ever does happen here, we too would,
could, might be swept into a similar vortex and find ourselves facing the
same kinds of choices that our cultural cousins did in 1933. How many
of us would, could, might buy into a tyrannical movement here? Some
of us, many of us, most of us? Perhaps, like Eichmann, most of us
would fail to process the choice or even notice that we had been
presented with one. Anyway, it's only a thought experiment.
5. The Question of Justice
A final thought. The holocaust was unique in one important way.
The international community responded. This genocide led to a change
in the rules. This arguments advanced during the Nuremberg and
Eichmann tribunals brought the burning question of justice back for
global review. What is justice? We began in 301 with the trial of
Socrates. We conclude in 402 with the Trial of Eichmann. What were
the questions? What were the responses? What were the moral
choices? What have we learned? Ironically the charges against
Socrates and Eichmann emerge from similar abhorrences: corruption
of human values.
At the 1945 war crimes trials, the Nuremberg Tribunal
established the principle of individual accountability of those who were
responsible for carrying out Nazi extermination policies. The following
year, the UN General Assembly drafted the convention to outlaw the
practice of genocide.
Was this progress? According to Plato, good is an essential
element of reality. Evil does not exist in itself but is, rather, an imperfect
reflection of the real, which is good. Virtue lies in the fitness of a
person to perform that person's proper function in the world.
The human soul has three elements-intellect, will, and
emotion-each of which possesses a specific virtue and role in the
good person: wisdom is attached to intellect; courage to will; and
temperance to the emotions.
Plato saw the ultimate virtue, justice, as the harmonious relation
of all the others, each part of the soul doing its appropriate task and
keeping its proper place. Plato maintained that the intellect should be
sovereign, the will second, and the emotions subject to intellect and
will. The just person, whose life is ordered in this way, is therefore the
good person. Disharmony is evil.
Plato had thus focused human thinking about justice and its
importance in human affairs. That attitude towards justice seeded
enlightenment thinking. Rousseau, Kant, de Tocqueville, and others
established the framework for human interactions--internally and
externally.
The product of this current of enlightenment ideas was made
flesh, so to speak, with the Declaration of the inalienable Rights of Man
by the National Assembly of France in 1789.
These inalienable rights included participation, through chosen
representatives, in the making of laws; equality of all persons before
the law; equitable taxation; protection against loss of property through
arbitrary action by the state; freedom of religion, speech, and the
press; and protection against arbitrary arrest and punishment.
The declaration had great influence on political thought and
institutions throughout the Western world. It was used as a model for
most of the declarations of political and civil rights adopted by
European states in the 19th century including the bill of rights of the
constitution of the Weimar Republic of Germany (1919-33).
This and other modern constitutional arrangements were
profoundly influenced by Hobbes and Rousseau. Rousseau's Social
Contract defined the sovereign is an artificial body into which each of
us alienates a portion of his power in common and under supreme
control of the general will.
Government, according to Rousseau is an intermediate body
established between the subjects and the sovereign charged with the
maintenance of liberty (p.119).
For Rousseau the will of the prince (government) is the general
will. If the prince has a particular will more active than that of the
sovereign and uses public force to obey his particular will, there [are]
two sovereigns, one by right and one by force. When that happens,
according to Rousseau, the social union would instantly vanish, and
the body politic dissolved (p.120, SC).
The instant the government usurps sovereignty, the social pact
is broken, and all common citizens are rightfully returned to their
common liberty, and are forced but not obligated to obey (p.138, SC).
From the Platonic perspective there is no justice in such an
arrangement. For Plato, intellect and its associated virtue wisdom
should rule. The hierarchy is: intellect, will, temperance. What is the
relationship between intellect and will when government displaces the
sovereign? Which survives? Does will not triumph--Triumph of the will?
But triumph over what? Was it triumph over intellect?
Of course the question one needs to ask is the degree to which
conditions in Germany during the Reich fit those just described by
Rousseau. Was the Third Reich a government which had in fact
usurped sovereign power--and thus was no longer an intermediate
between subjects and sovereign? And if so what then were the
obligations of the subjects if the social pact was broken? What does
Rousseau mean to be forced but not obligated to obey? The
relationship between the Prince and subject now, according to
Rousseau, would be one between a Master and Slave. In such a
relationship what is the duty of the slave? As citizen was Eichmann not
a slave and indeed no longer a citizen? Is the understanding and
realization of this transformation something we all at some level come
to know whenever it occurs?
Adolf Hitler through his 25 point National Socialist plank had
always been quite clear on the relationship between sovereign and
government. Point 25 expresses a marked rejection of Rousseau. "For
modern society, a colossus with feet of clay, we shall create an
unprecedented centralization which will unite all powers in the hands of
the government. We shall create a hierarchical constitution, which will
mechanically govern all movements of individuals."
There is no pretense here of a Rousseauean or Platonic tri-
partite state. It is clearly a two tiered and blatantly non-harmonious
master-slave arrangement between government and subject. Again, if
we regard justice as a harmonious relationship amongst three elements
of state, then this plank, by definition is a formula for injustice.
In the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, the legislative powers of
the Reich stag were passed to the cabinet. We should remember that
with less than a 20 percent share of the popular vote, the National
Socialists could not lay claim to having a mandate for expression of
general will. Nevertheless, the act granted Hitler dictatorial powers and
signified the end of the Weimar Republic. By a law enacted on
December 1, 1933, the Nazi party was "indissolubly joined to the state."
I'm sure Rousseau was spinning in his grave.
6. Conclusion
In the end, perhaps the main we are looking at this horrific
episode is to reflect again on the question of justice in light of a newly
defined crime: genocide. In Arendt's expression, genocide is seen as
an action against the human status and an attack against human
diversity.
Eichmann and his superiors believed they had a right to decide
who should and who should not inhabit the world. But the idea of
human diversity and equal human rights and freedoms which Eichmann
and his superiors denied--had sprung from centuries of reflection on
the question of justice and our understanding of justice as a virtue
guided by wisdom. Eichmann's denial of human diversity was in the
end the denial of justice. And for that he has found guilty.
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