THE DEATH OF JEWS IN THE HOLOCAUST REPLICATED THE DEATHS OF GERMAN SOLDIERS IN THRE FIRST WORLD WAR
 
Richard Koenigsberg
 
  1. The Privilege of offering a Sacrifice: This is what we mean when we say Germany (Hitler Youth officer Ernst Nielsen). Sacrifice for the German people was not to be feared. “Death holds no sting for us,” Himmler affirmed, because individuals die, while the Volk lives on.” Because the men of the Germanic SS were more concerned about the future of the Volk than about their individual destinies, members would “willingly and bravely seek death, wherever that is necessary.”
  2. "Life was embraced in death, death in life. The warrior’s affirmation of heroic death carried with it the obligation to procreate new life, to ensure that the eternal chain would go unbroken.” In his last letter to his mother, written before his death on the western front in 1940, Hitler Youth officer Ernst Nielsen tried to prepare her for the loss of her son.
  3. When the news arrived, he warned, she was not to grieve; rather, was to affirm the nobility of the cause: “If I die, mother, you must bear it, and your pride will conquer your pain, because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice that is what we mean, when we say Germany.” From: Baird, J. W. (1990). To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  4. In war, the body and blood of the soldier is sacrificed, giving rise to the reality of the nation. The sound and fury of battle,  dying and killing, substantiates the idea of the nation, anchors belief in material reality, persuading us that countries are more than social constructions. Surely, we think to ourselves, human beings would not, could not kill and die in such massive numbers unless they are doing so in the name of something eminently real. Sacrifice confirms the reality of the nation. Dying and killing bring into being the entities for which sacrifices are made.
  5. Human beings have not wished to make the “disconcerting” connection between the Holocaust and the First World War. As German leaders willfully sent massive numbers of Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust, so had they sent massive numbers of soldiers to die in World War I. Approximately 9 million soldiers were killed and 21 million wounded in the First World War. Sophisticated technologies evolved in order to kill human beings en masse. As soldiers were sent to the Western front where they were slaughtered in vast numbers during World War I, so were Jews transported to the death camps in order to be slaughtered in vast numbers.