Pedro Lilienfeld

In watching a documentary on Nazi Operation 1005 I reflected on Hannah Arendt’s oft cited phrase with which I’m entitling this essay. Sonderaktion 1005, as described under it’sWikipedia entry, was a top-secret operation conducted by the Nazis from June 1942 to late 1944. The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder that had taken place under Operation Reinhard, the attempted (and largely successful) extermination of all Jews in the General Government occupied zone of Poland. Groups of Sonderkommando prisoners, officially called Leichenkommandos (“corpse units”), were forced to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies; inmates were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping and were subsequently executed. The motivation for this operation was to erase any traces of the mass murders that could somehow be revealed to the world.

The documentary that I viewed was hosted by a contemporary German citizen who was investigating the role that his grandfather had played in the inception of this operation. He had discovered that this forefather was not only instrumental in carrying out the operation but was also involved in  innumerable assassinations of Jews, Roma, and Soviet civilians and prisoners of war.

The German narrator of the documentary delved deeply into information pertaining to his grandfather and in doing so had to face the unenviable task of confronting the reality of the unspeakable deeds of his SS-member forefather. This, obviously painful, confrontation with his family’s past raised in me the awareness of the strange and inexplicable paradox of two members of the same family merely separated by two generations exhibiting such drastically contrasting behavior. What lies at the root of this paradox?

This leads me to ask the fundamental question of how the evil of the Holocaust, its total dehumanization, cruelty and …the banality driving its enforcers could have happened. Here we have the case of these two Germans whose perception of reality and resulting behavior cannot be perceived as connected.

This example, probably repeated innumerable times, leads me to the very disturbing conclusion that under the appropriate conditions Homo sapiens is capable of committing the most dastardly of crimes if he feels to be part of a higher authority, a government, an institution, a predominant group. There is, of course, another common denominator to such atrocities: the victims have to be viewed as “the other”, i.e., they have to be a perceived to belong to a different ethnic, religious, national, even societal group.

If we consider the Holocaust as the ultimate incarnation of genocide/mass murder, we need to recognize also its was certainly not the first example of humanity’s extreme violence. What makes the Holocaust stand out is its magnitude and thoroughness, if not also the degree of its cruelty. Genocides and mass murders have both preceded and postceded the Holocaust. Examples are galore throughout history. Even during recent times we can mention several genocides: the Armenian one (1915-1917), at the hands of the Ottoman Turks; the Herrero and Nama (1904-1908), perpetrated by the Germans in their Southwest African colony; the Bangladesh ethnic cleansing (1971) of Bengali Hindus by Pakistani Armed Forces; the Cambodian genocide (1976-1979) by the Khmer Rouge; the Bosnian genocide (1992-1995) by Bosnian Serbs; etc., etc. Last but not least, the presently ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by Israel.

Returning to WWII and the Nazis, it is of interest to reflect on the contrasting dynamics between the Eastern and Western fronts of that war.

The former saw the Germans engaging in systematic genocide against what the Nazis perceived as the Judeo-Bolshevik cabal, i.e., the ruthless elimination of Jews and Soviets, both military prisoners as well as the civilian population. The Western front saw only localized barbarities such as the one against the people of the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944 in retribution of the killing of a Nazi functionary by French resistance fighters.

My family’s and my first hand experience reflects the largely arbitrary Nazi distinction between the two sides of the conflict. The German soldiers  who were quartered with us in the French town of Chateaubriant, although fully aware that we were Jews, behaved in a “civilized”, if not actually friendly, manner towards us. We were probably not perceived as being the “other” by those two German soldiers who had ostensibly not received orders to kill Jews. I can only surmise that had we been in a small town in the East (Poland, Russia, etc.) these same two soldiers would have murdered us without compunction. It is also likely that they were eventually transferred to the Eastern front where they may have then participated in the mass murders referred to above.

In this context, I was made personally aware of a whitewashing denialism by Germans, as late as the early 21st century, about the role played by the Nazi armed forces in the atrocities of WWII. I had met the Seattle German consul during a visit to the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. He maintained, emphatically, that the behavior of the German army during the war had been largely honorable and faultless, and that the massacres of Jews had been carried out only by agents of the SS and the Gestapo. The reality was, however, vastly different. In the authoritative description of The Third Reich At War by Richard J. Evans we learn the following: “On 19 May 1941, guidelines issued to the troops for the invasion (of the Soviet Union) demanded ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, Jews, and total elimination all active and passive resistance. The inclusion of ‘Jews’ as a separate category in this list was of enormous significance. Here was the German army being given license, in effect, to kill Jews wherever it encountered them, on the assumption that all of them were part of the Bolshevik resistance. The conquest of Poland had already demonstrated the murderous and often sadistic violence regular German troops would visit on ‘Eastern Jews’. The invasion of the Soviet Union was to reproduce this violence on a vastly larger scale”. Further on, Evans states: “Everywhere German troops burned villages to the ground and shot civilians by the thousand”. My recent German interlocutor was quite obviously being mislead by an illusory belief in the “honor” of the German military.

The Nazis’ ethnic cleansing on the Eastern front can be considered an extreme implementation of Thucydides dictum “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. In fact, that famous Greek general, historian and author of the admired History of the Peloponnesian War was referring to the brutal suppression by the Athenians of the rebellious inhabitants of the Aegean island of Melos (now Milos) by enslaving its women and children and killing the male population, an early case of genocide.

The preceding discussion leads me to the thoroughly depressing conclusion that apparently nearly all humans are capable of engaging in the most dastardly behavior towards our own species given the “appropriate” circumstances. Also, once embarked in such behavior the individual becomes increasingly inured to further and escalating acts of barbarism.

That brings me back to Gaza and the West Bank. The members of the IDF and those who control them, many of whom are themselves descendants and relatives of victims or survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, are engaging in genocide. A most unsettling thought indeed.