Humanism and Holocaust History

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Antony Beevor's The Second World War provides the outlines of World War II and devotes considerable attention to the Holocaust.

When studying a great evil we try to suspend judgment. We want to understand the evils of slavery while studying the psychology of the slaveholder and to do this with full knowledge as if we had been on either side of the whip.

No historian better handles this than Drew Gilpin-Faust. Her work on the women planters during the Civil War excuses no-one. When she writes of patriarchy or white supremacy, she does ss seriously and with specificity and manages to avoid the temptation to lump women, blacks, and poor whites into a vague activist mélange called "The People." Also, Faust sketched the real societal bonds that kept women in the cage. This humanist approach to history as opposed to marshaling history for condemnation or for the improvement of collective self-esteem is to emulated.

In the matter of the Jewish Holocaust, for all the talk of supremacy, Nazism in Beevor's narrative is savagery and cannibalism and not for mere rhetorical effect. The Nazis used human body hair, skin, and fat to make products. When practiced by the darker peoples of the world it is called savagery.

Here Beevor quotes a Nazi paymaster in the Ukraine:

In Bereza-Kartuska where I took my midday break, 1,300 Jews had been shot the day before. They were taken to a hollow outside the town. Men, women and children were forced to undress completely and were dealt with by a shot through the back of the head. Their clothes were disinfected for reuse. I am convinced that if the war lasts much longer Jews will be processed into sausage and be served up to Russian prisoners of war or to qualified Jewish workers.

Vasily Grossman, on studying Treblinka noted that 800,000 Jews and 'Gypsies' - the population of "a small European capital city" - were killed by staff of just over a hundred. "Never before in human history," writes Beevor, "had so many people been killed by so few executioners."

And so humanism fails us here. Perhaps not being German and thus at a greater distance or because we have not read enough. The scale of death duirng slavery coupled with industrialization presents a challenge. The irony of slavery in the United States is that the planters had an incentive to keep enslaved people alive. There were the embers of hate that leads to genocide but the fire was never lit, there was too much money involved.

There is no fresh insight here and the entire field of Holocaust Studies grapples with this challenge to be sure. Or they may have gotten past it.

A final point is that it is often said that racism is the result of a lack of education and must be defeated by civilization and progress. Nothing points to the silliness of that idea more than the Holocaust. "Civilization" is irrelevant to racism and we are muddled as to what "civilization" really means. When all our great theories, awesome literature, and philosophy leads a state bent on genocide, what are they worth? There were groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the Kalahari who were more civilized than Germany in 1943.