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The Holocaust as a Repetition of the First World War

In Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2003) Richard Rhodes observes that

“The Great War set the stage for the Holocaust. The foul trenches (‘the long grave already dug),’ the no man’s lands of barbed wire, the piles of rotting corpses, the muddy, denuded landscape prefigured the killing pits and the death camps of the Third Reich.”

In Murder in Our Midst (1996), Omer Bartov notes that the Holocaust was the “perfect reenactment of the Great War,” 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 safe for the guards.” 

     John Keegan in The Face of Battle (1976) cites Robert Kee who wrote that "the trenches were the concentration camps of the First World War,” drawing our attention to the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) when “long docile lines of young men, number about their necks…plodded forward to their own extermination.”

In Murder in Our Midst (1996), Omer Bartov notes that the Holocaust was the almost “perfect reenactment of the Great War,” 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 ma- chine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks. “But this reenactment had the great advantage that it was totally safe for the guards.” 

The death camps repeated what had occurred in the trenches. Hitler and his colleagues produced a massive reenactment: compelling Jews to experience what Hitler and German soldiers had experienced during the First World War.