Masters of Death (52 page)

The Great War set the stage for the Holocaust. The foul trenches (“the long grave already dug,” the English poet John Masefield called them), the no-man’s-lands of barbed wire, the piles of rotting corpses, the muddy, denuded landscape prefigured the killing pits and the concentration and death camps of the Third Reich. Hitler spent four years as a runner on the front lines in that war. He found himself in war, but he too broke down at the end of it, to forge a new identity on a vision of apocalyptic revenge.

Bauer argues plausibly that anti-Semitism was the organizing principle of Nazism:

In the Nazi case . . . the persecution of the Jews was pure, abstract antisemitic ideology in the context of biological racism, and it became a central factor in Hitler’s war against the world. In the minds of the Nazi elite, the main enemies of Germany—the Soviet Union, France, the United States, Britain—were controlled by the Jews. The proof of Jewish control of a country lay in the very fact that it turned against Germany. After all, World War II was started by Germany not for any economic or military reasons—nobody threatened Germany in 1939, and the economy had risen from the depth of the world economic crisis to almost full employment and prosperity. The desire to expand to the east and control Europe was motivated by a phantasmagoric racial-biological ideology in which the enemy was controlled by Jews; therefore, the Jews were, from the Nazi point of view, the main enemy. The war was indeed a “war against the Jews.”

But it is one thing to rage rhetorically against a people from the safety of a beer-hall stage, quite another to face the daily dreadfulness of murdering them. One place Holocaust historians seem not to have looked for models of the killing process is the history and anthropology of the slaughtering of animals for food. The parallels are compelling.

The French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles examines slaughtering in her book
Animal to Edible.
She remarks on the parallels “between the mass slaughter of animals and equally large-scale exterminations of human beings,” because she heard such analogies “expressed on a number of occasions, inside abattoirs themselves.” She found that modern slaughtering is carefully arranged to dilute responsibility for the actual killing by dividing the killing into stunning (with a hammer or a bolt gun), one man’s job, and then bleeding (by cutting the throat), another man’s job—two separate functions, usually performed out of sight of each other in two separate rooms, neither one of which can be said to cause the animal’s death. “We are left,” Vialles writes, “without any ‘real’ killing at all, nor do we have any one person who ‘really’ kills; by separating the jobs, you completely dilute the responsibilities and any feelings of guilt, however vague and held in check.” She compares this dilution arrangement to the one rifle loaded with a blank in a firing squad, “so that each person is able to believe, as he pulls the trigger, that he is not killing, or at least no one can be absolutely certain of having committed a fatal action.” The use of multiple executioners in the early Einsatzgruppen massacres served a similar function.

But as the range of Einsatzgruppen killing widened, the killing took on a different character. This too was prefigured in the history of slaughtering, Vialles writes:

Back in the days when slaughtering was done in the middle of towns, the butchers who worked and lived on terms of familiarity with blood were already credited with possessing a violent and brutal character. Whatever their means and whatever their skill, “master butchers live by slitting the throats of animals and will always, even if it is only metaphorically, have blood under their fingernails.” Moving abattoirs out of towns undoubtedly contributed towards relieving butchers of images of bloody brutality, but only the more effectively to transfer those images to the men who henceforth did nothing but slaughtering. Blood not only spattered their clothing; it appeared to impart a moral stain as well, either in terms of the sight of blood making men bloodthirsty or in terms of their sanguinary occupation attracting already “sanguine” temperaments.

The solution was to industrialize slaughtering. Fundamentally, of course, the industrialization of the slaughter of food animals concerned efficiency and therefore profit. But it also served to reduce the psychological disturbance the workers felt, Vialles argues:

It is a thought-provoking fact that the first industrial production lines were in fact slaughter lines in the Chicago abattoirs. . . . We know the effects of job fragmentation in terms of lowering awareness levels, and its application to slaughtering is probably no accident. Each man is able, as he performs a task that has been reduced to a small number of movements, to overlook the significance of those movements. Slaughterers often stress that once you “get used to it” you “stop taking any notice,” you “do it as you would anything else.” The thought vacuum and the lack of identification with one’s job that are elsewhere experienced as distressing features of production-line work, here constitute on the contrary a prerequisite for “getting used to it.”

The movement for “humane” methods of slaughter, another driving force behind modern industrial slaughtering technologies, did not originate among butchers but among middle-class English men and women repelled by the implications of the mass killing of animals. “The 1835 [English] law against cruelty to animals,” a British historian notes, “announced its intention of reducing both the suffering of dumb creatures and ‘demoralization of the people.’ . . . The S.P.C.A. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) may thus be regarded as another middle-class movement aimed at civilizing the lower classes.” Moving butchering out of sight paralleled moving public executions out of sight, another stage in the civilizing process that had been ongoing since medieval times.

Himmler’s was just such a middle-class sensibility, coupled grotesquely with the eager viciousness of a desk murderer. Pressing his organization to find a more “humane” method of slaughtering Jews, he extracted from it a solution similar to (perhaps modeled on?) the solution animal processors had evolved. For Himmler as for the English middle-class reformers (in Vialles’s words):

The logic of the industrial abattoir not only satisfies the specific techno-economic demands of the industry concerned; it also satisfies the demands of modern sensitivities in that it meets and readily takes account of considerations relating to the humane treatment of animals as well as our obscure desire for our meat to be obtained without bloodshed, for slaughtermen to be “just like other workers” and for abattoirs to be “just like other factories.”

Himmler also wanted his victims killed without bloodshed and his SS men to be just like other workers, which is the fundamental reason he switched the method of killing from Einsatzgruppen executions to gas vans and gas chambers. The difference between killing animals and killing human beings is not merely a matter of degree, however, whatever animal rightists believe. Himmler knew his project was fundamentally futile, or he would not have bragged ad nauseam about the “duty” of mass execution making his SS men “hard.”

The last word belongs to a victim who survived, Israel Goldfliess of little Trembowla in the western Ukraine, where the Seret River runs beside the town, writing his sister and brother-in-law in mid-May 1944:

Seven weeks have passed since the Red Army liberated us. What I have to tell you is not vain talk but the naked truth. To my sorrow, a pitiful few lived to see the liberation. It is with great difficulty that I write to you—my precious treasures, the only people still alive in my whole world. I did not know how it would be possible to hold a pen in my hand and write about what happened to us. I am indeed able to inform you of the good news that your brother is one of the few survivors, or, more accurately, one of the few miserable individuals who was fated to live through the torment of Hitler’s Seven Departments of Hell and remain alive. But when I remember all our suffering—the terrible shocking tragedy!—it is so awful, savage, dreadful that there is no prophet or writer who ever described, even in his imagination at its richest, such a horrible reality.

Killing sites await memorials all over eastern Europe.

NOTES

1 EASTWARD FROM PRETZSCH

3
Polish service, Russian preference:
Krausnick (1981), p. 122.
Pretzsch assignments:
Krausnick (1981), p. 122.
Handpicked leaders:
Krausnick (1981), p. 122.

4
Order Police battalion:
Büchler (1989), p. 457.
Destination England:
according to Lothar Fendler, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1978) (hereafter EG Trial Tr.), p. 3995.
“The last act”:
Speer (1970), p. 162.
“The idea of treating war”:
quoted in Fest (1970), p. 57, from Frank (1953).

5
Field marshal recollection:
quoted in Reitlinger (1957), pp. 124–25.
Polish campaign Einsatzgruppen:
Höhne (1969), p. 297.
Streckenbach:
Höhne (1969), p. 297.
Hitler’s card indexes:
Bromberg (1983), p. 93.
“As a group leader”:
Moczarski (1981), p. 106.

6
531 towns, etc.:
Lucas (1986), p. 3.
“The first victims”:
quoted in Lucas (1986), p. 3.
Wagner/Heydrich agreement:
Hilberg (1985), p. 191.
Heydrich letter to Einsatzgruppen commanders:
IMT IV, p. 119ff.
Eichmann:
Von Lang (1982), pp. 92–93.

7
Wloclawek incident:
Krausnick et al. (1968), pp. 51–52.
Polish leadership:
quoted in Padfield (1990), p. 273.
SS killings of the disabled preceded euthanasia:
Friedlander (1995), p. 136.
“In front of the pit”:
quoted in Friedlander (1995), p. 137.

8
Tiegenhof, Chelm:
Friedlander (1995), p. 137.
“After killing handicapped”:
Friedlander (1995), p. 139.
“Little by little”:
Von Lang (1982), p. 159.
Expulsions from western Poland:
Burring (1994), p. 69, citing
Das politischeΤagebuch Alfred Rosenberg,
ed., H. G. Seraphim (Munich: Deutscher Tasenbuch Verlag, 1964), p. 99.
“I had to set up guidelines”:
Von Lang (1982), p. 102.
“What a pleasure”:
quoted in Browning (2), p. 7.

9
“where, in a temperature”:
quoted in Padfield (1990), p. 288.
“your hair stand up”:
Gilbert (1947), p. 63.
One hundred mass executions, six thousand lives:
Lucas (1986), pp. 8–9.
“It is wholly misguided”:
adapted from translations in Klee et al. (1988), pp. 4–5, and Bartov (1992), pp. 65–66.

10
“Obviously it is possible”:
quoted in Padfield (1990), p. 287.
“may I kindly”:
Padfield (1990), p. 287.

11
“I will in no way”:
Padfield (1990), pp. 287–88.
“Executions of all”:
quoted in Manvell and Fränkel (1965), p. 85.
“With wagging pince-nez”:
quoted in Padfield (1990), p. 288.
“a war assignment”:
Waldemar von Radetzky, EG Trial Tr., p. 4142.
“putting down resistance”:
quoted in Klee et al. (1988), p. 81.

12
“terrain exercises”:
quoted in Reitlinger (1957), p. 182.
Brief military training:
Lothar Fendler, EG Trial Tr., p. 3993.
When EG learned of assignment:
according to Lothar Fendler, EG Trial Tr., p. 3995.
EG A 990 people:
Hilberg (1985), p. 289.

13
“had 180 vehicles”:
Ohlendorf, EG Trial Tr., p. 672. MacLean conclusions: MacLean (1999), p. 14.

14
Hitler himself dictated:
Krausnik et al. (1968), p. 60. Directive No. 21: IMT, PS-447.
“authorized within the frame”:
quoted in Headland (1992), p. 137.
“clash between two ideologies”:
quoted in Förster (1989), p. 498; Noakes and Pridham (1998), vol. 3, pp. 1086–87.

15
“Out of eighty”:
Clark (1965), p. 34.
“This is the first time”:
Schellenberg (1956), p. 196.
“bearers of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview”:
quoted in Förster, “Operation Barbarossa as an Ideological War,” in Cesarani (1994), p. 91.
Commissar Order:
see Lozowick (1989), p. 476.

16
Keitel’s conclusions:
quoted in Fleming (1984), p. 34.
“The fight which would soon”:
EG Trial Tr., p. 934.
Schulz testimony denying prewar announcement of Führer Order:
Other EG leaders on trial, of course, did make such a claim, but there is good evidence that they were lying. For a full discussion, see Alfred Streim, “The Tasks of the SS Einsatzgruppen,” in Marrus (1989), vol. 2, p. 436 ff.
Four categories:
from Heydrich’s 2 July 1941 minute to the Higher SS and Police Leaders, which “summarized” the “basic instructions” that he had already issued to the Einsatzgruppen. Quoted in Krausnik et al. (1968), pp. 62–63.