Vergiss Nicht
…is the inscription posted on the gates to Dachau, the former Nazi concentration camp (now historical site) outside of Munich. It means “Never Forget,” and since the world today is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s a good time to remember a few things about the Holocaust and the circumstances that brought it about.
Today it’s conventional wisdom to cite the Nazis as proof of the existence of evil as a metaphysical concept. While I would not argue with the sentiment underlying this idea, I believe that using “evil” in this sense perversely helps to excuse and externalize what the Nazis did rather than give us any guidance on how to avoid their savage behavior in the future or recognize it in ourselves. By calling the Nazis “evil” – a term always applied to others and never to oneself – we are implicitly suggesting that their actions were unintelligible by normal human morality, and that the people who did them were uniformly pathological or depraved.
In fact, what makes the Nazi crimes so terrifying and horrible is that they were the result of a very explicit ideology and systematic execution, by a government that prided itself on its efficiency. Hannah Arendt touched on this in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Meditation on the Banality of Evil. Hitler may have been insane and his inner circle a bunch of sadists and perverts, but the rank and file party members who staffed the machinery of atrocity were often “normal” people, probably not much different from people you meet today anywhere in the world. They were recruited into Hitler’s genocidal project by degrees, having been bombarded by rhetoric that fired their fears and hatreds, then awed by the spectacle of a mighty state moving forward toward the realization of its ideal, its historical mission.
Because the majority of the Nazis’ victims were Jews, it is natural to view Nazism as fundamentally anti-Semitic. This is true, of course, but it also confuses the issue. Unlike, say, the Russian Cossacks or the perpetrators of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, the Nazis’ problem with Jews was not primarily religious. It was partly racist, based on now-discredited theories of eugenics and biological explanations for cultural differences between human populations. Hitler clearly thought he was “purifying the herd” and pulling out the weeds so flowers could grow. But, critically, Hitler’s hatred of Jews was also specifically ideological.
And what was it he didn’t like? Hitler, the Austrian immigrant who became a zealous German patriot and acutely felt the humiliation of Germany’s defeat in World War I, rooted himself in nationalism. The aggrandizement of the German state and the German volk was the center of his political program. Nothing gets nationalists more pissed off than cosmopolitans – those educated, mostly urban elites who perceive greater commonality with others similarly situated elsewhere in the world than they do with the people and traditions of their own country.
Following World War I, cosmopolitanism was all the rage in Germany, and it was, often for good reason, intimately associated with avant gard art, left-wing politics, and transgressive sexual behavior. Then as now, this enraged conservatives, who saw the ideas and traditions at the root of their social and economic power threatened by “corrupt and decadent” tendencies emanating from the cities. Then as now, a disproportionate number of the writers, political agitators, “outrageous” entertainers, policy wonks and know-it-alls were Jews: assimilated Jews who felt comfortable enough in German society to flamboyantly step over lines held sacred by the God-fearing folks out in the hinterlands.
While some political parties in the Weimar state engaged in standard debates over these and other issues, many – especially those in the conservative South and rural areas – felt increasingly alienated and frustrated by the slow and unproductive process of government. In their churches and social clubs, beer halls and workplaces, they became radicalized in their reactionary politics by speakers using fiery rhetoric that spoke to their sense of victimization, and which gave them permission to dehumanize their political and social enemies in the most vulgar ways.
In 1932, in an accident of electoral politics, the leader of this movement, Adolph Hitler, became chancellor. Shortly thereafter, the Reichstag (parliament) building was burned in an apparent act of terrorism. Hitler blamed his enemies on the left and used the attack as the impetus for a gradual tightening of civil liberties. William Halperin’s excellent book, German Tried Democracy, provides many details from this period.
While legislation like the Nuremburg Laws singled out Jews (a visible but vulnerable minority), these measures are probably best understood by seeing Jews as a proxy for the entire class of progressive, urban, educated professionals who stood against Hitler’s militant nationalism. The racist nature of Nazism permitted atrocious behavior toward Jews that would have been more difficult to perpetrate against Hitler’s German political enemies in the first instance, but the terror that was unleashed served to intimidate potential opponents. Notably, the first concentration camps (prisons, not death camps) were for political prisoners – many Jews, but also labor leaders, professors, journalists, dissidents and recalcitrant civil servants, among others. The “ethnic profiling” that cast Jews as inherently more suspicious because they tended to fall into these categories greatly assisted the Nazis in their homeland defense policies during this period.
Once Germany was gripped by a politics of fear and hatred, it was a natural evolution from repression to murder. Scapegoating of political opponents and aggressive militarism fomented into a potent brew of violence and intolerance, which was kept at a high boil through the insidious propaganda produced by Goebells and his minions. When World War II began, the militarization of German society permitted and almost required an escalation of violence against “the enemy within,” because the Germans, convinced that their army in World War I was betrayed by a “stab in the back” rather than a superior military force, were determined to support their troops to the fullest. In their case, it went beyond yellow ribbons.
In this climate, it didn’t take much convincing for ordinary conservative family men, farmers and the repressed masses of the lower middle class who were the political base of the Nazi party to put their ideas into action. For years they had been hearing that the hated liberal cosmopolitans were less than human. Now their government gave them a chance to do something about it.
And so it happened that an educated, civilized European country became a society of mass murderers. They were not all possessed by the devil. Hitler did not control their minds, although he did mobilize their fears and unleash their hatreds. Many of them probably didn’t even think they were doing anything wrong. They may have even described themselves as idealists, optimists looking forward to a future of freedom and opportunity. Only in their defeat do we get to call them “evil.”
Today, as we commemorate the victims of the politics of hate and fear, we do well to remember that inscription over the gates of Dachau. Vergiss Nicht. Never Forget.
Update: Post title changed to the correct German (thanks, Mepriser) and Hannah Arendt's name now spelled properly (props: Regina).
11:15:08 AM 
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