The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

GÖTZ ALY
There is a broad consensus among scholars that no rationally conceived
motives informed the Nazis’ murder of European Jews. The political philosopher
Hannah Arendt, for example, emphasised that what made this crime unique
was not the number of victims, but rather the absence of any concern for the
economic utility of the victims on the part of the perpetrators. When it comes
to motives, historians prefer to stress ‘irrational racial hatred’, ‘destruction
for destruction’s sake’, a ‘black hole of historical understanding’, or the selfpropelling
radicalising capacities inherent in modern bureaucratic structures.
For many years historians have sought in vain for an order from Hitler to
destroy the Jews of Europe. However, from a careful examination of the
documents that are assumed to have ordered the murder of German psychiatric
patients or the deliberate starvation of ‘many millions’ of Soviet citizens, it is
clear that they ‘commission’ or ‘authorise’, which means that recommendations
or concrete plans were submitted to Hitler, Himmler or Goering for a decision:
to be approved or rejected, redrafted or put on hold. Goering also expressed
wishes about how these measures should best be disguised. Regarding the
murders perpetrated by SS task-forces in the former Soviet Union, Hitler simply
remarked: ‘as far as the world at large is concerned our motives must be in
accordance with tactical considerations . . . we will carry out all necessary
measures—shootings, resettlements etc.—regardless of this.’ This raises
questions about the authorship of these ‘necessary measures’, and above all
questions regarding aims and motives.
My starting point is that the Nazi regime relied to an exceptional degree
upon academically-trained advisers and that it made use of their skills. Their
ideas were transmitted upwards to the highest echelons by civil servants,
especially by the secretaries of state attached to the various ministries, many
of whom belonged to the General Council of the Four Year Plan agency, in
which capacity they ranked higher than their own ministers. The Four Year
Plan was designed to boost production in strategically vital areas of the
economy and it reached the apogee of its power between 1938 and 1942, during
which time programmes for the socio-political and economic reorganisation of
Europe were developed and converted into both policy and military strategy.
The concept of an ‘economy of the Final Solution’ was developed by
German experts—above all economists, agronomists, demographers, experts
in labour deployment, geographers, historians, planners and statisticians. They
made up the planning committees of such agencies as the Reich Office for
Area Planning, the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Ethnic
Germandom and the Four Year Plan authority. They conceived and discussed
solutions to the various ‘demographic questions’, and calculated the possible
‘release of pressure’ that would be the result of excluding Jews from the
economy. They recommended converting the Ukraine into Europe’s
breadbasket—taking into their calculations the deliberate starvation of ‘many
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