On Arno Mayer's Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History

...This is not the same as saying the `preselected' Jews and Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz, especially Birkenau, to be gassed...

...In Russia the Bolshevik Revolution opened the way to their more nearly equal participation in society...

...In his previous books Mayer has portrayed modern European history as a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, between the forces of movement and the forces of order...

...Although Mayer subsequently explores the "linkages" between Nazi Jewish policy, anti-Bolshevism, and total war, he ignores another key linkage—that between Nazi Jewish policy and Hitler's war aims, namely his schemes for a total reordering of Europe along racial lines...

...The vast intensification of the murder campaign against Russian Jewry dates from mid-July, at the height of victory euphoria...

...In Auschwitz and Majdanek, which contained both labor and death camps, there was a "conjuncture and inseparability between labor exploitation and extermination...

...He envied Stalin's ability, for instance, to murder the bulk of his officer corps...

...400 • DISSENT...

...Certainly in Auschwitz and probably for all of Europe as well, he claims, more Jews died of "so-called 'natural' causes" (exhaustion, malnutrition, disease, exposure) than "unnatural" causes (gassing, shooting, injection...

...While the Germans eliminated Jewish communist functionaries like any other party cadres, they ghettoized the bulk of the surviving Jews, "apparently without any thought of exterminating them after victory...

...Without waiting for such technological advances, Einsatzgruppe A reported a body count of 85,000 by September 19...

...But as the book progresses, the real thrust of Mayer's argument becomes apparent...

...Likewise, Hitler loved the gadgets of modern technology, from fast cars to V-2 rockets (might one add gas chambers...

...Nowhere in Mayer do we learn of the Berlin reply on December 18, 1941, to an inquiry about whether all Jews should be liquidated regardless of age, sex, and economic interest: "In the meantime clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded in principle in the settlement of this problem...

...Once again Mayer must ignore considerable evidence to sustain the notion that the gassing of Jews in the death camps emerged only after the winter of 1941-2 as a kind of afterthought to the "hyperexploitation" of labor...

...Mayer does not stop with this specious scholasticism but pushes his point even further...

...In the first two weeks of August, Himmler toured the eastern front, encouraging his men in their onslaught against the Jews...

...One leitmotif of Mayer's book is the responsibility he heaps upon the old elites for the Nazi dictatorship, the war, and the "Judeocide...

...Much of the best recent work in Holocaust studies, though not on the sweeping and ambitious scale attempted by Mayer, has been precisely along these lines...

...Hitler, the SS, and the generals shared art "ideological-programmatic consensus" about this war of conquest and destruction, but it was not yet characterized by any fixed notion of killing all the Russian Jews...

...For Mayer the second thirty years war of 1914-45 was a fusion of these elements — "ideological crusade" and "total" war...

...I would suggest the following...

...Ultimately, Mayer does not believe there was a Final Solution, if one understands that Nazi euphemism to mean a conscious Nazi policy aimed at the systematic extermination of every last Jew in Europe...

...Mayer seeks the "driving force" behind the "Judeocide" in two earlier historical parallels...

...He concedes the fact that—unlike non-Jews—Jewish women, children, and elderly were also sent to Auschwitz along with Jewish workers...

...When confronted in mid-August with the complaints about the terrible psychological cost to his men of killing women and children, Himmler ordered his crime lab scientists to experiment with killing methods that would be "more humane" for his executioners...

...In the end one must return to Mayer's admission that the camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka "defy explanation...

...He regarded Stalin as a great historical figure...

...In fact Himmler was rapidly approaching his goal...

...If Mayer captures the functional utility of Hitler's ideology, above all its capacity to offer something to almost everyone, in my opinion he misses its wellspring...

...Hitler's anticommunism and antimodernism were partial and qualified...

...For the period after the defeat of the "Judeobolshevik" regime in Russia and the extermination of European Jewry, the even more grandiose schemes of Generalplan Ost were on the drawing boards, entailing the uprooting and removal of over thirty million people, solely on racial grounds...

...In the month of August alone one of these brigades reported a body count of 44,000...

...Instead, the Jews of Russia and the rest of Europe were to be resettled over the Volga or beyond the Urals...

...Quite rightly Mayer emphasizes that for Hitler the Jew appeared in many different guises—"the antithesis of the German Aryan, the purveyor of modernity, the prime mover of parasitic capitalism, the agent of Marxist subversion, and the master of Bolshevik Russia" — and was thus the ideal "single enemy" to symbolize all the demons of his "syncretic ideology...

...In what Mayer calls the "classic country of unsimultaneity," modem and traditional elements combined in an unreconciled and explosive mixture...

...German defeat and Jewish death did not follow the same trajectory...

...Mayer must ignore considerable evidence to sustain his view that the "derailment" of Barbarossa unleashed the "Judeocide" only in the fall of 1941...

...Mass executions did not therefore begin only with Babi Yar...

...The second is the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, a "total war" and "general crisis" of European society that involved enormous civilian casualties...

...This fact meant that the nonworkers were doomed to die in the terrible conditions there in any case...

...Victory would have kept open the historical possibility of a significant remnant of Jews enduring...

...Moreover, Germany's generals and industrialists share equal standing with Hitler and the Nazis as the perpetrators of this mass murder...

...He admired his ruthlessness and iron will, which were remaking Russia...

...These sweeping condemnations, at least partially justified but usually devoid of the nuance and qualification that would shed more light than heat, reach their untenable extreme when Mayer writes, SUMMER • 1989 • 397 "In 1932-33 a self-appointed oligarchy of traditional conservatives and reactionaries had prevailed on Hitler to assume power...

...These plans had nothing to do either with an anti-Bolshevik crusade or the frustrations and exigencies of defeat in total war...

...In the first four or five weeks of Barbarossa, Mayer argues, the Jews were subjected to "spontaneous" and "unpremeditated" pogroms by the vigilantes of the anti-Semitic and anticommunist "rimland" populations but not to systematic massacre...

...For instance, the advancing Einsatzgruppen almost immediately took control of the local anticommunist units, whose pogroms they had encouraged and incited...

...This extraordinary allegation, it must be said, finds no support whatsoever in any documents or historical studies that I have seen, and Mayer's book—without footnotes—provides no evidence for it...

...In Western Europe the French and Industrial Revolutions brought emancipation and prosperity to the Jews...

...We are once again led back to mid-summer 1941 and the height of German victory for the genesis of the Final Solution...

...For Mayer Jews were killed because they were identified with Bolshevism, because they were expendable labor, because they were easier prey than elusive partisan bands, because the camp and ghetto conditions were terrible, because the Germans were increasingly enraged over their impending defeat, and so on...

...By December 1942, one month before the debacle at Stalingrad and a full half-year before the Germans permanently lost the initiative at Kursk, over 75 percent of all Holocaust victims were already dead...

...Mayer's desire to examine the correlation between Nazi Jewish policy and the course of the war is a promising approach if done accurately...

...As for the place of the Holocaust in history, therefore, it was not a decisive step in the creation of Hitler's New Order, but the most fatal convulsion of the Nazi Behemoth's death throes...

...Himmler and Heydrich in turn must have been first incited to their task by Hitler earlier yet...

...A mass of unassimilated Ostjuden, strangers in their own lands, thus lived within a hostile political environment in the most "imperiled geopolitical zone" in Europe...

...The pace of systematic killing rapidly accelerated after mid-July 1941, when 398 • DISSENT Nola' 111111111•n Himmler committed two SS brigades (over 13,000 men) to operate behind the fast-advancing and overburdened Einsatzgruppen force of three thousand men...

...How and why did the Jews become the most prominent victims of this second thirty years war...

...Because the death camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka had "none of the ambiguities" of Auschwitz and Majdanek and "had no function other than the mass murder of totally unarmed and helpless civilians," Mayer finds them "much more difficult to fit into historical focus...

...These elements facilitated the "Judeocide" but they were not its "mainspring...

...Nowhere in Mayer do we learn that Nazi "Jewish experts" traveling back from meetings in Berlin in October could casually inform their friends that "in the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures...

...it was not the byproduct of desperate labor impressment to stave off defeat...

...With the miscarriage of Barbarossa, particularly the delayed capture of Kiev in late September, the invading Germans—both army and SS—began "venting their rage" on the Jews out of fear of possible defeat...

...Nowhere in Mayer's book do we learn that within two to three months of the invasion of Russia, Heydrich informed Eichmann of Hitler's decision for the physical extermination of all European Jewry...

...Therein lies the major source of confusion and controversy in the book...

...In October, during the great Nazi encirclement victory of Vyasma and Bryansk (and not during November as Mayer alleges), Herbert Lange toured the Warthegau looking for a proper site for the Chelmno death camp...

...In his discussion of Hitler's syncretic ideology, anti-Semitism is conceded and expansionism and anti-Marxism are explored, but the basic racist underpinnings of Hitler's Weltanschauung—his understanding of history as a struggle of races in which the Jews played the most nefarious role—is given short shrift...

...Following the "maddening winter of 1941-2," Mayer argues, the "deliberate mass murder of the Jews was set in motion" by a "program of extermination through forced labor...

...Mayer sees such documents merely as evidence that Himmler was becoming "more and more incoherent...

...Mayer rejects the notion that the "Judeocide" was a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon, characterized by "modern technology" and a "bureaucracy of violence...

...For Mayer "Nazi Germany's assault on Soviet Russia was sui generis" —an absolute or total war to conquer Lebensraum in the east but also a crusade to extirpate "Judeobolshevism...

...The starting point was the great massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev on September 29-30...

...In desperation they turned to Hitler and his lowermiddleclass supporters "to restabilize their endangered positions...

...This depiction of Nazi Jewish policy is, in my opinion, quite mistaken...

...As Mayer's book demonstrates, an attempt to situate the Nazis' Final Solution in history without taking this into account is bound to go astray...

...If Mayer's beginning conception and many of his insights are laudable, how did he go so wrong...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, the Jews embraced liberalism and capitalism in the West and supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia...

...For the same reason, he cannot conceive of a Nazi program to kill Jews solely because they were Jews...

...They were killed, according to Mayer, for every conceivable reason but the most simple and obvious: They were killed because they were Jews...

...they were racism gone berserk, and Mayer misses this point because he does not take Hitler's racism seriously...

...Thus "selection upon or after arrival was merely the logical consequence and implementation of this prior warrant for destruction...

...It was the concomitant social change of the modernization process, again symbolized above all by Jewish emancipation, that he hated...

...The initial pogroms—so emphasized by Mayer—constituted only a minute fraction of the killing subsequently carried out by these units under direct German supervision...

...His emphasis on anti-Bolshevism as the most crucial element for the old elites' participation in the genocide is sound...

...The first is the Crusades, in which an ideologically driven "holy war" resulted in the massacres of Jews and Moslems...

...Many historians have noted the close connection between Barbarossa and the Holocaust, but Mayer goes beyond this in arguing that the latter was "grafted" (this seems to be Mayer's favorite metaphor) onto the former...

...Gassing developed only gradually and "may be said to have intensified the torment of the camp's Jews in degree, not in kind...

...Mayer's attempt to correlate the Final Solution to Germany's sagging military fortunes works no better for the later years...

...Mayer's tendency to downplay the importance of Hitler and his anti-Semitism on the one hand and to emphasize antimodemism, anticommunism, and the role of the old elites on the other culminates in his interpretation of the relationship between the German attack on Soviet Russia —"Barbarossa" —and the Final Solution...

...In the East European "rimland," however, the old order persisted, and the demographic center of European Jewry lay in countries characterized by hypernationalism, virulent anti-Semitism, and active illiberalism...

...Hitler's ability to forge an alliance between the antimodernist fears of the lower middle class and old elites derived from a "syncretic ideology" composed of anti-Semitism, social Darwinism, the geopolitics of eastern expansionism (Lebensraum), and antiMarxism, all appropriated from the ideological arsenal of conservatism...

...If Eastern Europe was fated to become the killing fields of the "Judeocide" and its dense population of unassimilated Jews the most numerous victims, the "epicenter" of the European "disequilibrium" was Germany...

...One must be frank: They defy his explanation, and they do so because he refuses to understand the Final Solution for what it was—the Nazis' plan to kill every last Jew in Europe on whom they could lay their hands...

...Mayer is also quite right to remind us that the anti-Semitism of Hitler and the leading Nazis was only part of the equation and that one must take into account the enabling and facilitating factors of the "Judeocide...

...With the courage of his convictions, Mayer does not shrink from the logical, albeit dubious, implications of his interpretation, namely that had the blitzkrieg succeeded in the east . . Europe might ironically have been spared the worst horrors [and] the Jews, instead of being massacred, probably would have been deported...

...In fact, the faster and easier the victory, the larger this remnant and the better the chances for contingent survival would doubtless have been...

...The evidence could be multiplied but the point is already clear: The notion of a systematic German assault on Russian Jewry dating only from the end of September and deriving from the frustration of defeat is simply fanciful...

...Despite Germany's economic modernization, the old elites strove to maintain their domination...

...The subtitle of Professor Arno Mayer's Why Did The Heavens Not Darken...

...Mayer does indeed attempt to set the "Judeocide" (a term he prefers to Holocaust) within various comparative frameworks, as the subtitle promises...

...This fusion created "an enormous historical convulsion in which the Jews were the foremost but by no means the only victims...

...Thereafter, the more frustrated the Germans became, the more the "crusade within the war" intensified at the expense of the Jews...

...Mayer's intention to set the Holocaust in a wider historical context and to explore its "linkages" to other Nazi concerns and obsessions is perfectly valid...

...These experiments led directly to the gas vans, which went into use in the death camp at Chelmno in early December...

...Mayer sees European Jewry as caught in the middle of this conflict...

...It was not the totalitarian terror of Stalinism but rather the emancipatory, egalitarian, and internationalist—that is the Jewish— aspects of Marxism that Hitler abhorred...

...The mass murder of the European Jews was the first use to which German victory was going to be put...

...Between 1939 and 1941, when Hitler was allied with Stalin and every war was a success, Hitler's demographic engineers were already preparing for a massive population shuffle in which the expulsion of the Jews was but one aspect...

...In fact for Mayer they admittedly "defy explanation...

...However, Mayer does not ask himself what the implications of this candid admission are for the adequacy of his interpretive framework...

...Biological politics" was fundamental to Nazism...

...But according to Mayer antimodemism was the key motive not only for the old elites and the lower middle class but for Hitler himself...

...If the mass murder of Russian Jewry is in Mayer's view "grafted" onto the spiraling brutality of the anti-Bolshevik crusade, the extension of the mass murder to the rest of European Jewry is seen within the context of the economic imperatives of total war, with the intensifying persecution of the Jews "calibrated in accordance with the productivityutility precept...

...In the same month SS officers arrived in Belzec, where camp construction began on SUMMER • 1989 • 399 November 1. The death camp was a totally unprecedented invention...

...Hit=ler's savage determination to kill all the Jews as fast as possible, and his impatience with a short stay of execution even for desperately scarce Jewish skilled workers, is well documented...

...Instead Mayer sees the mass murder of European Jewry as a byproduct of Nazi Germany's anticommunist crusade on the one hand and its hyperexploitation of impressed labor on the other...

...If Hitler's worldview had an epicenter, it was his deep-seated animosity toward contemporary civilization, and not his hatred for Jews, which was grafted onto it...

...Not only did the middle-echelon officials know of the looming Final Solution in the fall of 1941, but concrete preparations were already underway...

...Jews "were deported there as part of a vast impressment of all Europe for the benefit of Nazi Germany's overstrained war machine...

...In contrast, Hitler's racial anti-Semitism was total, implacable, and uncompromising...

...If the death-camp solution had been approved and was being implemented in October, the problem must have been posed by Himmler and Heydrich to their SS planners much earlier...

...is The "Final Solution" in History...

...He is not so much placing the "Final Solution" in a wider historical context as he is redefining it...

...Because of his determination to emphasize the priority of labor over gassing, Mayer's logic and prose become increasingly tortured...