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Reflections on SS Thinking and the Holocaust and Brian Crim's Review Essay
In his essay essay on Heinrich Himmler, Max Hastings writes about the "stunning incompetence" with which the Nazi war machine was conducted. He says that he never has ceased to be amazed by the atuhority entrusted to men of miserably meager talents.
Heydrich and the SS, Hastings says, were "amazingingly careless with the rational priorities of war," devoting themselves with "demented single-mindedness to pursuing, herding, and eventually killing Europe's Jews."
Hastings writes about the economic and strategic cost to Germany of undertaking a program of “liquidating those who were unwanted, while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance.” Only fools could have chosen to “address the agenda of supposed ethnic purification before Nazi hegemony on the Continent was secure.”'
Like many historians, Hastings sets up a dichotomy between the “rationality” of warfare, on the one hand, and the “irrationality” of genocide, on the other. But why do we continue to insist that warfare is "rational"--in light of the monumental destructiveness that it brought about in the 20th century--and in the present century as well?
in Hitler's case, was there really a distinction between the Holocaust and the Second World War? The primary objective of each was to rid the world of Jews or "Jewish Bolsheviks?" Is there a actually a difference between the killing that took place in the death camps and the killing that took place on the Eastern Front?
Brian Crim's review essay of Andre Mineau’s SS Thinking and the Holocaust, challenges the view that genocide and warfare are distinct political forms. In his review, Crim demonstrates that the Holocaust and Second World War were two sides of the same coin: the struggle to free the world of “Jewish Bolshevik bacteria.”
An order issued by Field Marshall Reichenau to Wehrmacht forces in October 1941, three months into the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), stated that the objective of war against the “Jewish Bolshevik system” was “complete destruction of their means of power and elimination of the Asiatic influence from European culture.” The troops faced tasks that “exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering.”
The need to eliminate “Asiatic influence from European culture,” Crim says, meant that “nothing short of genocide, a racial reordering of the continent under National Socialist terms, accomplishes this goal.” Reichenau’s directive encapsulated the National Socialist worldview by framing war as a “clash of civilizations, inevitable and indispensable to saving the German race.”
Nazism grew out of the belief that Germany and the world were threatened by “biological evils.” Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust therefore, Crim says, were “inextricably linked to the same massive biological engineering project.”
Mineau puts it starkly: “Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust can be understood as a single and gigantic sanitary operation.” To the SS, securing the German Lebensraum was essentially an “antibiotic operation.” Confronted with the pervasiveness of biological evil, Nazism was the “politics of hypochondria.”
The Nazi party consistently portrayed Germany as a “patient in danger of racial infection.” War was a matter of self-defense, a “prophylactic,” and therefore ethical. Total war sought “total health.” The war against the Soviet Union was officially discussed by Hitler on March 30, 1941, during a speech to top Wehrmacht commanders. General Franz Halder noted the essentials:
This would be a “clash of two ideologies,” a “war of extermination.” It was necessary to fight against the “poison of disintegration.” Commanders would have to “overcome their personal scruples.” After decades of fostering an anti-Semitic world view, Crim says, the Wehrmacht was encouraged to “act against Judeo-Bolshevism without restraint.”
If the “Final Solution sought the extermination of the Jewish people and Operation Barbarossa was a war of extermination, what is the difference between genocide and war?
Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the largest military operation the world had ever seen. By the time the brutal Russian winter descended, millions of Soviet POWs were dying in captivity, penned in behind barbed wire with no protection from the elements, executed en masse by the German Army or transported to Germany for extermination by the hundreds of thousands.
Adam Jones estimates that in a mere eight months, 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war died from systematic starvation, forced labor, disease, shooting and gassing. This case, Jones says, vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the “most concentrated mass killing in human history.” During the course of the Second World War, according to Crim, 5.5 million Soviet POWs died in captivity.
If nearly 6 million Soviet prisoners-of-war were murdered gratuitoulsy by German soldiers, what was the difference between the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa?
Max Hastings disparages the Nazi leadership for undertaking a program of ethnic purification while the “outcome of the war still hung in the balance.” The is an old-fashioned perspective. The "war against the Jews" was a single project: the Holocaust and World War II two sides of the same coin.
Hitler believed that Europe was being "inundated by disease bacilli which at the moment have their breeding ground in Russia,” and therefore abandoned war against Great Britain to attack the Soviet Union in order to destroy "Jewish-Bolhsevism."
Andreas Hillgruber points to a parallel between the launching of the war against the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Final Solution. The conquest of European Russia, for Hitler, he says, was inextricably linked with the extermination of Jews.
The racist component of Hitler’s thought was so closely interwoven with the central political element of the program, Hillgruber states, that “Russia’s defeat and the extermination of the Jews were—in theory and later in practice—inseparable for him.”
Hastings claims that Nazi leaders like Himmler, Heydrich and Goering were amazingly careless of the “rational priorities of war.” This assumption of the "rationality" of warfare is breathtaking. It is estimated that over 21 million people died in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and that nearly 60 million people overall died. By what measure could fighting this war be conceived as "rational?
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