Understanding the relationship between the First World War and the Holocaust begins with Omer Bartov’s Murder in Our Midst. Please read the extracts below. The concept of mass killing of human beings by states, as well as the technological and administrative means for organizing such vast operations, Bartov says, were “lifted directly from the realities of 1914-18.”

The Holocaust was the almost “perfect reenactment of the Great War,” with the correction that “all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other.” Everything else was there, "the barbed wire, the machine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks." But this reenactment, Bartov observes, had the great advantage that “it was totally lethal for the inmates and totally safe for the guards.”

There is much reluctance, Bartov notes, to associate the imagery of the Great War with the Holocaust. This has to do both with the “discomfort of perceiving national wars as instances of industrial killing” and with the general tendency "to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, or “at least on the difference between genocide and war.”

Taking Bartov’s insight a step further, I hypothesize that the Holocaust was created as a repetition of the First World War. Hitler, who had experienced the First World War, was the prime mover. Along with other veterans of the First World War, he brought the Holocaust into being in order to repeat the trauma.

The Germans, now, would not be victims, but perpetrators. This is the psychological mechanism of turning passivity into activity, or as I put it, “do unto others as has been done unto you.” Having been the victims of poison gas attacks, Hitler and his comrades now would subject others to poison gas attacks.

It’s not difficult to see that the Jew in the death camp symbolized the German soldier in the First World War.

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg

Bartov, Omer (1996). Murder in Our Midst. New York: Oxford University Press

5—The very concept of mass killing of human beings by states, as well as the technological & administrative means for actually organizing such vast operations, were lifted directly from the realities of 1914-18. Unlike the killing facilities of the euthanasia campaign, the death camps did not resemble medical installations, but were architecturally and organizationally modeled on the experience of the Great War, incorporating all the attributes of a military environment, such as uniforms and barbed wire, watch towers and roll calls, hierarchy and order, drill and commands.

5—The genocide of the Jews was directly related to the Great War, since the very concept of mass killing of human beings by states, as well as the technological & administrative means for actually organizing such vast operations, were lifted directly from the realities of 1914-18. The death camps were architecturally & organizationally modeled on the experience of the Great War, incorporating all the attributes of a military environment, such as uniforms and barbed wire, watch towers and roll calls, hierarchy and order, drill & commands. The Holocaust was therefore a militarized genocide

33—One of the most striking aspects of battlefield descriptions in Great War literature is the extent to which they resemble accounts of the Holocaust. The similarity is rooted in the sense of existing in an unimaginable environment, one that no human mind, not even the most perverse, could have conjured in fiction.

The only fictive universe that can claim affinity to these world is that of Hell, especially the imaginary Hell of medieval painting. Yet Hell enjoys the advantage of accommodating only sinners, and is ruled by strict laws and divine logic. The landscapes of the World War One and the Holocaust, on the other hand, are the domains of the innocent, inhabited by souls who never expected to end up in them, and conforming to no rational plan or logic decipherable by their victims.

34—That other link between the holocaust and 1914-19, namely, that in both cases the millions devoured by the event stubbornly perceived it for a long time as something quite different from what it actually was, which goes some way to explain not only their willingness to enter that universe from which so many did not return, but also our own difficulty in understanding their psychology, indeed our reluctance to “empathize” with them, since they had been deceived while we already “know” the “truth” about their fate.

Hence, even if few of us would put it so bluntly, we perceive the victims as being complicit in their own destruction, the soldiers of the Great War by having marched so willingly into battle and conducted it for so long and with such untiring determination, the victims of the Holocaust by having put up so little resistance, reacting to Nazi genocide in traditional ways of seeking some arrangement with the persecutor.

49—For the Holocaust was far more directly the almost perfect reenactment of the Great War (and its own imagery of hell), with the important correction that all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other. Everything else was there: the barbed wire, the machine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks. But this reenactment had the great advantage that it was totally lethal for the inmates and totally safe for the guards.

49—Arriving at the camp, inmates were beset by a sense of unreality, disbelief, shock…Their descriptions often resemble those of soldiers arriving at the front, who were similarly struck by its “hellish,” nightmarish appearance: “All around us were screams, death, smoking chimneys making the air black and heavy with soot and the smell of burning bodies. It was just like a nightmare and it took weeks and weeks before I could believe it was really happening.”

“Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something…little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it…Was I awake? I could not believe it. No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare!” “Many times I felt I must be dreaming, and I would call to myself: ‘Wake up! Wake up! You are having a nightmare!’ I would look around me, trying to wake up, but alas, my eyes kept on seeing the same dismal picture.”

50—Yet there is much reluctance to associate the imagery of the Great War with the Holocaust. This has to do both with the discomfort of perceiving national wars as instances of industrial killing and with the general tendency to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, or at least on the difference between genocide and war.

But while there is clearly a distinction to be made between the mutual killing of soldiers and the wholesale massacre of defenseless populations, it is crucial to realize that total war and genocide are closely related. For modern war provides the occasion and the tools, the manpower and the organization, the mentality and the imagery necessary for the perpetration of genocide.

With the introduction of industrial killing to the battlefield, the systematic murder of whole peoples became both practical and thinkable: those who had experienced the former could imagine and plan, organize, and perpetrate the latter. All that was needed was the will to act, and by the end of the Great War there were not a few men who believed that their only escape from the hell of modern war was to subject others to the industrial killing they had barely survived.
 

57—The Event: In much of the English-speaking world it is called the Holocaust. This is a highly evocative term, of course, since it carries with it the connotation of sacrifice, without specifying who sacrificed whom for what. If the Jews were the victims, the Nazis the slaughterers, what then was the purpose of the sacrifice?