What’s So Special About the Holocaust?

History has seen many genocides and large scale killings. Some of those resulted in more deaths than the Holocaust. So why is the Holocaust special? It’s special because it was the first and last example of the industrial production of corpses. It was, quite literally, a murder machine. The murders were not the actions of specific individuals who did what they did because of their identity, motives or pathologies. They were not like the brutalities of the Roman Emperor Nero, which were clearly his. Nor were they like the crimes of Saddam Hussein or any other identifiable criminal. In the case of the Holocaust, it was impossible to recognize an identity in the deed. The killers were impersonal, insignificant, loyal, conscientious and hardworking civil servants operating together in an organized, efficient, systematic and planned extermination, characterized by division of labor and the industrial production line. Everyone knew exactly what to do, and often that was a very small part of the process. Shared responsibility is often seen as diminished responsibility, and makes it easier to produce corpses. The detailed planning, organization and execution of the project sets the Holocaust apart from other genocides. Eichmann protested against spontaneous pogroms in the east, not because he was a humanitarian but because those unorganized interventions messed up his bookkeeping and made it difficult to count how many exactly were killed by the otherwise machine-like operation.

The Holocaust was not the action of an individual or a small group of people. Nor was it motivated by egoism, the will to power, money, hate, rage, revenge, sadism, war or the elimination of opposition. The victims were not guilty of opposition or even crime. The perpetrators weren’t motivated by self-interest (for example, the Nazis prohibited private confiscation of Jewish goods for personal use). Neither was it primarily the hatred of Jews that led the Nazis to try to exterminate them. It was the love of humanity – or better what they considered to be true humanity – and the need to protect it. The Holocaust wasn’t a war crime either and wasn’t part of the normal atrocities of war. It started well before the war and the German war effort suffered substantially from it: potentially useful labor forces were eliminated, soldiers and other means that could have been used in the war were diverted to the extermination effort etc. The Jews were murdered, not because that would have allowed soldiers to fight rather than guard prisoners, but because they were Jews. The extermination continued even in the final days of the war, when Germany was losing and all military resources should have gone to the war effort. And, finally, the purpose of the Holocaust wasn’t to instill fear. Normal state terror serves to scare the population and convince it to submit and to behave in ways that are acceptable to the rulers. Not in the case of the Holocaust. Fear had become useless because it couldn’t serve to guide actions and to steer away from danger. Danger would have found you anyway. Everyone knew that you were a Jew, and tactical maneuvering motivated by fear could have helped you escape only in very few cases.

Mengele’s twins

Self-interest, power hunger, sadism, revenge or other utilitarian motives were seen by the Nazis as diversions from the genocidal operation that was undertaken for the benefit of mankind. As was the military self-interest of Germany’s success in the war. The project of extermination of the Jews and the protection of mankind was more important than the risk of a possible military defeat of Germany. Pity as well could not stand in the way of the demands of nature and history. The pleas of the victims were not heard and people convinced themselves of the historical and natural necessity of the Holocaust. Like pity, the taking of money from a victim as a bribe for letting him or her live was a betrayal of nature. Germans had to be the superhumans that they were destined to be, free from all that makes us ordinary humans: pity, self-interest, hate and the will to power.

The Holocaust wasn’t a crime. A crime is a deed that goes against social order and established law and that challenges the powers that represent social order. In this case, we have an atrocity that emanated from the state and that had become the moral and legal law. Murder had become a form of government. Evil no longer had to fight the Good, and no longer had to hide and to be hypocritical. Evil ruled. There was only evil. The world was without a horizon, without hope or salvation. Another reason why the Holocaust can’t really be called a crime is the fact that the perpetrators didn’t have criminal motives. They just carried out the verdict of nature and implemented the laws of nature. A deeper legality defined the actions of government. Murder had become the law of nature as well as the legal law and the law of morality.

More on the Holocaust here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (125): Germany Occupies France

A Frenchman weeps as German soldiers march into the French capital, Paris, on June 14, 1940, after the Allied armies have been driven back across France

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More iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (124): Desparation

A woman places a sheet over two children who were killed by their mother who then killed herself after learning her husband lost his life fighting outside Frankfurt, by Margaret Bourke-White 1945

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More iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (87): “Die Flucht”

victim of “Die Flucht”

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Sudeten Germans were attacked and painted with Swastikas on their backs for real or perceived Nazi affiliation

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At the end of and immediately after WWII, millions of ethnic Germans were cleansed from the eastern parts of Europe and sent to the areas which would become post-war Germany and post-war Austria, partly in retaliation for wartime cleansing by Nazi Germany. The areas of expulsion included pre-war German provinces as well as areas which Nazi Germany had annexed or occupied.

At least 12 million people - the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 - were expelled from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. Those who survived the journey – about 500.000 did not – found themselves among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could.

This was the largest movement or transfer of any population in modern European history. A part of those fleeing did so “voluntarily”, in fear of the advancing Red Army. Others were forcefully expelled in an effort by the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union to redraw the European post-war map and to create ethnically uniform nations and territories. By 1950, the ordeal had ended.

Retaliation and “reparation” were the most commonly cited justifications for the expulsion; ethnic peace was another one: “defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations”.

To make the horror complete,

tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies’ cynical formulation, “reparations in kind”) in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. (source)

A gruesome anecdote:

The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch’s only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.

Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that “she was frozen to the floor with her own blood.” Other than temporarily stopping the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. (source)

More here and here. More iconic images here.

Political T-Shirt (16): With a Secret Message

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Fans at a recent right-wing extremist rock festival in Germany thought they were getting free T-shirts that reflected their nationalistic worldview. But after the garment’s first wash they discovered otherwise. The original image rinsed away to reveal a hidden message from an activist group. (source)

The message “Hardcore Rebels – National and Free” gave way to “If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We’ll help to free you from right-wing extremism”. Clever, although it’s obviously a lot easier to change inanimate objects than it is to change extremist human beings.

More political t-shirts here.

Human Rights Facts (69): What Dictatorship Does to You, A Comparison of East Germany Before and After the Fall of Communism

After a previous post comparing North and South Korea – a natural experiment for assessing the value of political freedom – I stumbled across the work of photographer Stefan Koppelkamm who has done something similar in Germany:

During a trip to East Germany in 1990, photographer Stefan Koppelkamm discovered buildings that had survived both the war and the construction mania of the East German authorities. Ten years later, he returned to photograph the buildings again. (source)

Here are some examples:

More here. More human rights facts here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (73): You Can’t Say Asshole in Germany

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Helmut Manz, who serves as deputy spokesman for the Left Party in North Rhine-Westphalia, was attending a demonstration outside a hall where Thilo Sarrazin, former Bundesbank Board member, was scheduled to speak. (Sarrazin is the author of the controversial book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany Does Itself In”), in which he disparaged the work ethic and intelligence of Germany’s Muslim immigrants, views German Chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to criticize as “absurd.” ) Someone in the crowd reportedly heard Manz call Sarrazin an “ass,” prompting Sarrazin to file a complaint against Manz. According to Der Spiegel’s report, German law proscribes cursing at others with expletives. Manz has now been sentenced to pay a fine of 500 Euros or spend 50 days in jail but is appealing. In an interview about his sentence, Manz said that he does not remember making the remark, adding:”All racists, which therefore includes Mr. Sarrazin, are assholes.” (source)

More absurd human rights violations here. Also more about obscenity, fighting words, insults and hate speech. And more about free speech in general.

Human Rights Maps (110): Ethnic Cleansing in Europe After WWII

(source, from “Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948″, Edited by Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak; click on the image to enlarge)

After WWII, millions of ethnic Germans were cleansed from the eastern parts of Europe, partly in retaliation for wartime cleansing by Nazi Germany. Read the whole story here.

Here’s another version of the map:

(source, click image to enlarge)

More maps on ethnic cleansing are here. Some more descriptive information is here. More human rights maps are here.

Related Articles

• Eric Hobsbawm on multiculturalism | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• 40,000 Irish people to be Ethnically Cleansed (politics.ie)
• Nick Clegg rejects social ‘cleansing’ claims (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Ben Daniel: Why Do We Ignore the Plight of the Roma in Europe? (huffingtonpost.com)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (38): German Civilians forced by the US Army to Visit Buchenwald

German Civilians forced by the US Army to Visit Buchenwald. Image by Margaret Bourke-White

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Margaret Bourke-White – who also took this famous photo of Gandhi – was with General Patton’s Third Army when they reached Buchenwald on the outskirts of Weimar. Patton, outraged by what he saw, ordered his police to get a thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done.

Bourke-White said, “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day… and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me”.

LIFE magazine decided to publish these photos in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them”. (source)

Margaret Bourke-White prepares to take a photo of corpses, April 16, 1945

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More iconic images of the holocaust. More information on the holocaust. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (32): Book Burning in Nazi Germany

(source, read the full story here)

More iconic images of human rights violations are here. Something about freedom of speech is here. And here is a case of quasi book burning. And here’s a nice cartoon to remind us that this isn’t something that only happened in a certain country at a certain time:

book burning in the USSR and Nazi Germany

(if you don’t recognize the figure on the left, it’s Nikita Khrushchev holding a paper about the Pasternak controversy, one of many instances of book banning in the USSR; of course, book banning isn’t quite the same as book burning, but in a sense it’s even worse)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (31): Kristallnacht

(source; Kristallnacht, a beautiful name for one of the ugliest pogroms in history; read the full story here)

More images of the Kristallnacht are here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (30): The Bombing of Dresden

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

Read the story behind this atrocity here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (29): Doctor Josef Mengele’s Twins

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More on Mengele and on the story behind his experiments on twins and others is here. More iconic images of the holocaust are here. More about the holocaust in general is here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Limiting Free Speech (2): Holocaust Denial

holocaust denial

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In the introductory post of this series, I summarized the dangers of limiting free speech while at the same time granting that such limits are necessary in some cases. One case is Holocaust denial, or Holocaust revisionism as it is referred to by its supporters.

What is Holocaust denial?

Holocaust deniers only rarely claim that the Holocaust didn’t take place or that no Jews were killed by the Nazis. Rather, they claim that either or all of these facts are lies:

• The Nazi government of Germany had a policy of deliberately exterminating the Jews
• Over five million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis
• The extermination was carried out with tools such as gas chambers.

Instead of outright negation, there is trivialization. Moreover, Holocaust denial claims that the holocaust is a deliberate Jewish conspiracy created to advance the present-day interest of Jews and Israel.

Most historians and scholars reject Holocaust denial as a pseudo-science that fails to respect the rules of historical evidence and that is grounded in hatred rather than the pursuit of knowledge. Holocaust denial is characterized by the distortion or falsification of historical documents and the selective use of sources.

Holocaust deniers are mainly far-right, neo-nazi types and antisemites, but there are also far-left deniers, islamic deniers etc.

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How can we justify the limits on free speech inherent in laws prohibiting Holocaust denial?

Nothing that went before is in itself sufficient to justify laws limiting the right to free speech of Holocaust deniers. According to the rules set forth in the introductory post in this series, one has to show that some rights are violated by Holocaust denial, and that this violation is worse than the violation of the rights of Holocaust deniers which would result from Holocaust denial laws.

There are a few possible kinds of justification:

1. Antisemitism

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There is antisemitism inherent in Holocaust denial, although it is not necessarily obvious or immediately apparent. It is often implicit rather explicit antisemitism: the Holocaust is an invention of Jews, a tool to make them look like victims instead of criminals, and thereby gaining some sort of immunity for their vicious acts. Or a tool to make financial claims on Germany.

However, the mere antisemitism of Holocaust denial is not a sufficient reason to prohibit it. Antisemitism as such should enjoy the protection of the freedom of speech. Only when antisemitism explicitly incites to violence against or discrimination of Jews can it be forbidden. And Holocaust denial is rarely this explicit.

The offensive nature of Holocaust denial does undoubtedly inflict harm on Jews, especially the survivors of the camps, but no harm in the sense of rights violations. One could claim that Holocaust denial perpetuates and encourages antisemitism and therefore increases the likelihood of antisemitic attacks on individual Jews. But it would be a tough job establishing the causal links.

One could also claim that Holocaust denial perpetuates negative stereotypes in society, and thereby contributes to the marginalization of Jews. Again, difficult to prove.

In general, Holocaust denial is such a marginal phenomenon that it’s difficult to claim that it makes a substantive contribution to violence and discrimination. But in some countries or subcultures, the balance can be different.

2. Offensive speech

Justifying the prohibition of Holocaust denial merely on its offensive nature, would open the floodgates to a massive number of possible limitations of free speech, especially in the field of blasphemy. This would lead to an excess of political correctness and ultimately to “thought police”.

3. Libel

A justification based on the harm to the reputation of Jews would make Holocaust denial similar to libel. However, libel is traditionally designed to protect an individual’s reputation, income, and honor against abusive and harmful accusations. I fail to see how Holocaust denial can be directly harmful to individual Jews. Group defamation is highly controversial and could lead to the same problems cited in the previous point.

4. Democratic self-defense

Sometimes limits on rights are necessary to protect a rights-supporting community against anti-democrats who use democracy against democracy. A democracy is a particularly vulnerable form of government. The freedom it delivers can easily be misused by those who want to take it away. Anti-democratic and illiberal forces are free to use rights, freedoms and democratic procedures for the promotion of tyranny and oppression. The purpose of many holocaust deniers is the resurrection of Nazism, and a condition for this resurrection is the denial of the Nazis’ greatest crime. There can be no hope for acceptability of far-right policies as long as the Holocaust stands in the way. German Nazism, of course, is notorious for the way in which it misused the imperfect Weimar democracy.

Seen in this light, the criminalization of Holocaust denial is a self-defensive act of democracies in their struggle against extremism. Holocaust deniers use the freedoms of democracy in order to overthrow it. One cannot reasonably force democracies to abstain from self-defense. No system can be required to cherish the seeds of its own destruction.

To the extent that Holocaust deniers aim to overthrow democracy, they are hardly in a position to complain about limitations of the freedoms they would like to destroy:

One has no title to object to the conduct of others that is in accordance with principles one would use in similar circumstances to justify one’s actions towards them. A person’s right to complain is limited to violations of principles he acknowledges himself. John Rawls

John Rawls

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You should not ask something for yourself that you are planning to deny to others. This, according to me, is the strongest justification of Holocaust denial laws, even in those countries were the revival of Nazism of highly unlikely. It may be unlikely precisely because of measures such as Holocaust denial laws. More on tolerance of intolerance here.

5. The defense of Israel

Some extreme Islamists use Holocaust denial in their campaign against Israel. They hope that when they negate the Holocaust, they can remove one of the moral foundations of the state of Israel (as a refuge for the survivors). This negation, they hope, can help their efforts to destroy Israel.

However, whereas this justification may be useful in some circumstances, it is difficult to use it for an outright, worldwide prohibition on Holocaust denial since Holocaust denial outside of the Middle East can hardly be linked to the possible destruction of Israel.

6. The special case of Germany

In Germany, there may be an additional justification available. Holocaust denial laws can there be seen as part of a package of reparative justice, a kind of “sorry” issued by the state, a public acknowledgment of responsibility.

7. The interest of historical truth

Whereas truth is very important, it seems wrong to use laws to enforce the truth. Truth should be based on proof and sound argument, and using the law to punish “lies” only encourages those who believe the lies. They, and others as well, will think that there must be something wrong with the “truth” if it needs the law for its protection.

Conclusion

There is a case to be made for Holocaust denial laws, but one should be very careful and limit the prohibitions to cases and circumstances that really require them. Not all forms of Holocaust denial is equally pernicious, and not all circumstances are equally dangerous. Moreover, one should take into account the counterproductive effects of stigmatizing a certain group: persecution by the law can encourage them, can increase the number of sympathizers, and can give them more publicity than they would otherwise receive. Ignoring Holocaust deniers rather than criminalizing them could often be the most successful strategy. And some justifications should be avoided because they can create a dangerous precedent.

Countries with laws against Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 13 countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland (source: here or here).

Human Rights and International Law (7): Crimes Against Humanity

This is from the infamous Nazi newspaper of Julius Streicher, Der Sturmer, from 1934. The cartoon praises the Nazi Ministry of Culture for removing Jewish teachers from German classrooms. Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and hanged in 1946.

A crime against humanity is a large scale atrocity against a civilian population, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing or the massive killing of civilians during war, and is the highest level of criminal offense. It is either a government policy or a wide practice of atrocities tolerated, condoned or facilitated by a government. Atrocities such as murder, torture and rape are crimes against humanity only if they are large scale and part of a widespread or systematic practice organized or condoned by a government. Isolated atrocities are certainly human rights violations, and can perhaps even be war crimes, but they don’t fall into the category of crimes against humanity. (And acts which do not violate human rights can never be crimes against humanity, even if they are widespread and systematic and even if they cause suffering).

Crimes against humanity can take place during a war or in peace time, and can be committed by a state against its own citizens or against the citizens of another state.

I’ve tried to put these and other distinctions in a drawing:

Some examples of the meaning of the digits:

1. lack of recognition or love
2. corruption (although corruption, especially large scale and systematic corruption, can have consequences for human rights and should then be part of number 4)
3. poverty
4. murder
5. crimes against non-combatants; torture of prisoners of war; the crime of international aggression (crime against peace)
6. genocide, ethnic cleansing
7. genocide or ethnic cleansing as part of the “war effort”

What Are Human Rights? (13): Not Absolute – The Case of the State of Emergency

Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the main human rights treaty, creates the possibility for states to declare a so-called “state of emergency“, a temporary suspension of mechanisms for the protection of some human rights when this is required by a national crisis:

1. In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with their other obligations under international law and do not involve discrimination solely on the ground of race, color, sex, language, religion or social origin.

2. No derogation from articles 6, 7, 8 (paragraphs 1 and 2), 11, 15, 16 and 18 may be made under this provision.

3. Any State Party to the present Covenant availing itself of the right of derogation shall immediately inform the other States Parties to the present Covenant, through the intermediary of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, of the provisions from which it has derogated and of the reasons by which it was actuated. A further communication shall be made, through the same intermediary, on the date on which it terminates such derogation.

Paragraph 2 states that the emergency can never warrant the violation of the right to life, the right not to be tortured or held in slavery, the right to due process, or the freedom of thought and religion.

This provision seems to be very reasonable. It is the case that human rights can be misused for the destruction of a human rights protecting community. And the democratic mechanisms can be misused for the abolition of democracy. (This is the famous theory of the suicide of democracy, the best example of which is the Nazi take-over in Weimar Germany). When this misuse develops to a certain scale, one can indeed speak of a regime crisis and a state of emergency suspending certain human rights protections may be the only alternative left to save the community.

For example, in times of war or civil war it is impossible to insist that all human rights and democratic principles be fully applied. The enemy should no be allowed to use human rights for the destruction of a democratic and human rights supporting community. Furthermore, a war, because of the urgency it creates, makes it very difficult to respect certain democratic habits, such as the consultation of large parts of the population, the thorough examination of all alternatives etc. A strong, individual leadership seems better adapted to the urgencies of war. On top of that, the war effort and the war industry require a unity of vision and a high level of cooperation without dissent. Dissent can harm the struggle for survival. It weakens the effectiveness of common actions and it can be exploited by the enemy. In a state of war, society and politics take over many of the undemocratic habits of the military, such as discipline, secrecy, strong leadership, the absence of criticism, uniformity instead of diversity and so on. The war industry as well can harm human rights, for example the rights concerning free choice of labor, good working conditions etc.

Perhaps there are also non-war situations, or warlike situations which do not resemble traditional warfare (such as the “war on terror” if there is such a thing), which may warrant temporary suspension of human rights protection. However, the goal of this post is not to disentangle this notoriously difficult question.