The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

GÖTZ ALY
marginalisation and extermination of allegedly ‘less valuable’ elements as a
scientific way of improving mankind or ‘healing the body of the nation’, so
economists, agronomists and planners thought their work would result in the
‘healing of the structure of society’ in underdeveloped regions of Europe. The
mere ‘co-eaters’ would be separated from ‘economically really active people’. In
so far as the Jews, active in such sectors as trade and handicrafts, which the
Germans regarded as overcrowded and superfluous, were not already doomed,
socio-political and economic restructuring pushed them yet further into a position
where they lost their property and all means of earning a livelihood. In this way
racial and economic selection criteria were harmonised, with a consensus replacing
alleged conflicts of interest between rational planners and racial fanatics. This
consensus and the social sanitising concepts which underlay it gave the systematic
and centrally planned murder of millions of people its own gruesome dynamic.
Evidence of a technocratically rational agenda does not make these crimes
‘comprehensible’ let alone ‘understandable’, in the sense of having empathetic
understanding for something. But looked at in this way, the crimes Germans
committed in these years assume a rather different character, and require us to
undertake the search for causes and continuities afresh and perhaps with yet
greater seriousness.
Finally, there is the question of uniqueness. We began by considering Hannah
Arendt’s statement that no rational motives informed the Final Solution, a view
with which most historians concur. In her important work on the origins of
totalitarianism, Arendt made the following pertinent observation:
The imperative ‘Thou shalt not kill’ fails in the face of a demographic
policy which proceeds to exterminate systematically or industrially
those races and individuals deemed unfit and less valuable, not once
in a unique action, but on a basis obviously intended to be permanent.
The death penalty becomes absurd when one is not dealing with
murderers who know what murder is, but rather with demographers
who organise the murder of millions in such a way that all those who
participate subjectively consider themselves free of guilt.
What did the demographic policies of both of the major dictatorships of this century
have in common The Stalinist population policy of the 1930s— the eradication
of the kulaks (peasant farmers)—corresponded in many respects to the policies
pursued by the Nazis between 1939 and 1944. Discrimination against minorities,
the mobilisation of the rural population, forcible colonisation, slave labour, cultural
and linguistic homogenisation, and progressive forms of extermination. Both
dictatorships pursued strategies of more or less violent modernisation, based upon
the degradation of people into ‘human contingents’, to be administered,
dispossessed, resettled, privileged or marginalised at will. At the heart of such
policies was the belief that in this way socio-economic structures could be
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