Part X

A Final Note

Without the “prior deprivations, ostracism and institutionalized plunder of the German Jews—in full view and with the increasing approval and complicity of millions of Germans—The Final Solution would not have been possible,” asserted historian Avraham Barkai.

The fact that people were becoming accustomed to mass murder surely played a part in this process, opined historian George Mosse. Although there were massacres in the 1890s, they were not critical in changing people’s perceptions. What occurred in World War I was more important in transforming this attitude. But it was the Japanese invasion of China that was especially significant, for this was the first time in Germany and elsewhere that there were “inconceivable figures of Chinese killed” being broadcast over the radio.

When political scientist and historian Raul Hilberg was asked why the Germans murdered the Jews, he replied: “They did it because they wanted to do it.” Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda, declared, “No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution to this question.”

Most perpetrators viewed their involvement in the mass murder as “a perfectly normal job. These were average citizens who attended to the business of killing for some time, as though on a temporary job change, only to return later to the civilian occupation for which they had been trained,” asserted Helge Grabitz, a West German official who prosecuted Nazi officers.

In terms of their “moral makeup,” they were similar to the rest of the German population. They were not a “different kind of German.” Hilberg noted that they were a cross-section of the population—“every profession, every skill, and every social status was represented in it.”

G.M. Gilbert, who served as a prison psychologist at the Nuremberg war crime trials in 1945-1946, said the most challenging question ever posed to him on this subject was raised by Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at the Adolf Eichmann trial, which began on April 11, 1961, in Jerusalem. During direct examination Hausner asked, “What kind of mentality did the mass murderers of Hitler’s SS possess to be able to do the horrible things they did?”

Although the Israeli court disallowed the question, since it wanted to focus on the judicial question of Eichmann’s guilt, Gilbert said the question about human nature still persists: “What kind of animal species is it that organizes and executes senseless, coldblooded, systematic slaughter of its own members, and how do some of its members become qualified to perform this inhuman destruction of their fellow human beings?”

When Gilbert asked Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, if he had ever considered whether the Jews merited their fate, “he tried patiently to explain that there was something unrealistic about such a question because he had been living in an entirely different world. ‘Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us.” Hausner noted that Gilbert said it “apparently meant nothing to him that he had murdered millions of people; he had no hesitation in describing everything in detail; and without any attempt to share blame, or to attempt defense or anything; quite spontaneously—certainly not with any urging on my part.”

Although annihilating the Jews “was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order,” Höss said, “nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

Furthermore, “If the Führer had himself given the order for the ‘final solution of the Jewish question,’ then, for a veteran National Socialist and even more so an SS officer there could be no question of considering its merits. ‘The ‘Führer commands, we follow’ was never a mere phrase or slogan. It was meant in bitter earnest.”

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.