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Write a single paragraph reflecting on your impressions regarding the reading. Write one for each source… there should be three in total. The sources are attached below.Week 5 Journal: Chapter 6 “Momentum toward Genocide” in Lifton, Jay and Markusen, Eric. The Genocidal Mentality. Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat. Basic Books, 1990.Week 9 Journal: Chapter 5 and 10 in Browning, Christopher. The Ordinary Men of Police Battalion 101: and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992.Week 12 Journal: Day 1: Chapter 1 ” Zakhor: The Task of Holocaust Remembrance, Questions of Representation, and the Sacred” in Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed : Museums and the Challenges of Representation. Rutgers University Press, 2014. (NAU Library Online).
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The Genocidal
Mentality
NAZI HOLOCAUST
AND NUCLEAR THREAT
Robert Jay Litton
and Eric Markusen
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers
New York
This book derives in part from the
Peter B. Lewis Lectures of the Center of International Studies,
delivered at Princeton University by
Robert Jay Lifton in 1988.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lifton. Robert Jay. 1926The genocidal mentality: Nazi holocaust and nuclear
threat / Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen.
p.
em.
“This book derives in part from the Peter B. Lewis
Lectures of the Center of International Studies,
delivered at Princeton University … in 1988”—
Verso t.p.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0—465-02662-1
1. Nuclear warfare—Psychological aspects.
2. United Slates—Military policy. 3. Genocide—
Psychological aspects. 4. Holocaust. Jewish
(1939-45)—Psychological aspects. I. Markusen,
Eric. II. Title.
U263.L53 1990
355.02’17’019—dc20
89-43101
CIP
Copyright © 1990 by Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen
Designed by Vintent Torre and Ellen S. Levine
Printed in the United States of America
90 91 92 93 HC 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
Chapter 6
Momentum toward
Genocide
A vicious spiral has been created that gives the
arms race a “mad momentum” of its own and
drives it forward blindly.
—Herbert York
The easiest [message] to get through … is “go.”
—Thomas Powers
WHEN AND how does a group or a society cross the threshold into
genocide? When and how, that is, does the genocidal mentality
become converted into the genocidal act? To answer these ques
tions, we must examine the collective and institutional momentum
that presses toward genocide.
In using the term behemoth for Nazi Germany, the distinguished
German-born social theorist Franz Neumann combines the biblical
“great or monstrous beast” with the sense in which Hobbes used
the term to describe the chaos, lawlessness, and disorder of seven
teenth-century England during its civil war. But Nazi Germany,
whatever its chaos and lawlessness, also possessed deadly order
and murderous lawfulness.
The spirit of this entity was prefigured in the Nuremberg rallies,
with their merging of the individual into the mystical collectivity,
their esthetic and ideological transcendence, and their message of
Momentum toward Genocide
157
irresistible power. The Nazi behemoth became, then, an organic
force of destruction—in psychohistorical terms, a collection of
institutions that, however disparate and antagonistic, were effec
tively integrated in the common pursuit of genocide. The nuclear
behemoths of the United States and the Soviet Union follow most
of that description, though their relation to genocide is never one
of overt pursuit.
Commentators have referred regularly to “the problem of mo
mentum’’ as having haunted the nuclear arms race from the time
of the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (or of the inability to make a decision not to drop them)
to the subsequent decades of nuclear-weapons development by the
United States and the Soviet Union. That is what Herbert York
(see chapter epigraph, page 156) means when he speaks of the
arms race as driven “blindly” in a “vicious spiral” of “mad momen
tum.”
Always contributing to the momentum toward genocide is the
spirit of nuclear crusade. That deformed spirit flourishes in the
presence of manichean dualisms, the division of the world into
light (American goodness) and dark (Soviet evil); or on the Soviet
side, the same dualism in reverse. In each case, the weaponry took
shape in a country long involved in an ideological crusade against
the other, a crusade that, whatever its episodic lulls, has intensified
weapons building and general embrace of nuclearism. Increasing
that momentum are the irrepressible creative energies of individu
als and groups—scientists, engineers, and nuclear strategists—
which both contribute to and draw upon ever-accelerating techno
logical developments with their “unforeseen” and “irreversible”
and “unintended” consequences “that turn out to be not entirely
unintended.”
This combined momentum—ideological, creative, and techno
logical—is perceived by the weapons community of each super
power and leads to fears (genuine, exploited, and usually both)
that the momentum of the other behemoth is still greater (the
nature of nuclear behemoths will be discussed later in the chapter).
The resulting action-reaction dynamic persists even during peri
ods of political detente, in relation to a weapons technology that
is “extremely open-ended.” The “endless generations” of weap
158
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
ons development become bound up with perpetual genocidal mo
mentum in each behemoth unless decisions are made to interrupt
the cycle. “The men in the laboratory” are, in proposing and
developing technologies for new weapons and for improving old
ones, “a prime source” of this momentum, as Zuckerman stressed.
But laboratory scientists are just one group who increasingly de
pend upon active involvement in this momentum toward genocide
as a form of self-definition. Herbert York speaks of a larger com
munity of defense intellectuals for whom this intensified arms race
is a source not only of regular income and important consultant
fees but of solving “psychic and spiritual needs,” since “a very
large part of their self-esteem [derives] from their participation in
what they believe to be an essential—even a holy—cause.” There
is a kind of equilibrium between the active inertia of the arms race
(inertia here meaning the tendency of something in motion to stay
in motion) with a more passive psychological inertia (the tendency of
something at rest to stay at rest—in this case the dependency of
the self on the arms race).
Momentum extends readily into the impulse to use the weapons,
especially when close to the threshold. As Thomas Powers has
pointed out, “once war has become inescapable, there is some
thing to be gained by going first” as “with glacial inexorability the
fear of war is . . . pushed aside by the fear of being caught on the
ground” (see pages 4-5). Different as their situation was, the
Nazis’ irresistible momentum toward genocide—developing out of
the interplay between organizational (and ideological) energies
and new technology—has some relevance for nuclear danger. Very
important for Nazi genocidal momentum was the wartime situa
tion which enormously intensified both feelings of threat and im
pulses toward the most violent forms of national rejuvenation. In
the nuclear case also, should there arise any possibility of war, a
point could be readily reached at which, as Powers tells us, the
easiest message to get through is go. One recalls Brodie’s early
reading of such a situation—“Be quick on the draw and the trigger
squeeze, and aim for the heart”—while recognizing that “you will
probably die too!”
Momentum toward Genocide
159
I he Nazi Behemoth
In the final analysis the destruction of the Jews was
not so much a product of laws and commands as it
was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of
consonance and synchronization.
—Raul Hilberg
Recent historical studies suggest that it is virtually impossible to
determine the precise moment when the Nazis crossed the genoci
dal threshold. These studies also suggest that many different
forces contributed to that step, including (as the historian Saul
Friedlander explains) “the interaction of entirely heterogeneous
phenomena: messianic fanaticism and bureaucratic structures,
pathological impulses and administrative decrees, archaic atti
tudes and advanced industrial society.” But all observers agree
that prior Nazi attitudes and actions had long been setting the
stage for such genocide, though no straight line of intent led
inevitably to it. What the genocide required was a particular ideol
ogy and mind-set, considerable institutional and bureaucratic mo
mentum, and finally a set of immediate historical circumstances
that contributed to the crossing of a macabre threshold.
Ideology and Meaning
Nazi ideology provided not a blueprint for, but a structure of
thought, a tone, and a mentality fully consistent with, genocide.
Nazi political and biomedical ideology, that is, rendered the geno
cide an act that “had meaning to its perpetrators.” The totalistic
ideology and its “leader principle” provided a justification for
destroying any individual or group considered undesirable or oth
erwise threatening to Nazi goals. From the beginning, the regime
killed those judged to be opposed to it or otherwise threatening.
Indeed, the Nazis mobilized great ideological energy by render
ing their cause a life-and-death struggle for Germany and for the
Nordic race. They focused strongly, especially during the early
160
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
days of the movement, on their survivor mission from the First
World War, claiming to be carrying out their unfinished work in
avenging their “betrayers” and restoring German glory. They
powerfully invoked the theme of sacrifice, pressing for the ultimate
if unrealizable ideal: “Everybody is ready to die for everybody
else.” The killing of designated enemies then became part of a
quest for “more life” for the German people and more health for
the Nordic race, a quest that required “a continuous search for an
increasingly radical solution to the Jewish question.”
Yet despite the fierce anti-Semitism of Hitler and the ideologues
around him, most historians are convinced that there were no
plans for mass murder until “the end of 1940 al the earliest” or,
as most believe, some time in the middle of 1941. Before that,
consistent Nazi policy had sought “removal” (Entfernung), or
forced “emigration” of Jews, to be accomplished by “ghettoization, starvation, humiliation, and persecution.” Contained within
such victimization, however, was the pseudoreligious impulse to
ward “purification of German soil and German blood.”
An important step toward releasing previously suppressed “es
chatological-apocalyptic tendencies inherent in Nazism” was the
event the Germans called Kristallnacht—the systematic, govern
ment-instigated national pogrom of 9 November 1938 in which
Jews were beaten, humiliated, and arrested, and synagogues and
Jewish-owned stores destroyed. Kristallnacht was an attempt to
reinvigorate the Nazi revolution, to maintain the active energy of
“a movement” rather than to risk becoming merely a “traditional
right-wing dictatorship.” It was in that sense both a “culmination”
of existing ideological passions and at the same time “a dividing
line” because it clearly increased the momentum of Jewish victimi
zation. The Nazis were approaching the threshold to genocide.
Another important step was Hitler’s first public threat to bring
about “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” a threat
made in January 1939 in connection with his blaming the Jews for
the impending war. The threat, though not backed by any concrete
plan, had considerable psychological importance as a preliminary
statement of an imagined act. The invasion of Poland in Septem
ber 1939 provided a further “release” for true believers not yet
Momentum toward Genocide
161
quite able to acknowledge—or at least to state publicly—the extent
of their own murderous inclinations. That is, they embraced an
ideology that enabled them to view all Jews as evil and criminal,
and inwardly wished to destroy the Jews, but had not yet reached
a mind-set of planning and carrying out the mass murder of an
entire people. Indeed, as we have noted, certain Nazis (including
many Nazi doctors) never became convinced that the genocidal
project was right or necessary, but participated in it nonetheless
with the help of only partial, even fragmentary, ideological convic
tions. Over time, increasingly radical and destructive Nazi policies
contributed to an overall shift in mind-set that made leaders more
bold, and followers more compliant, in relation to genocide.
Hitler was at the center of this ideological process, a “fighting
prophet” whose anti-Semitism was crucial to his world view from
the beginning but became “ever more salient” to his visions and
actions. Hitler’s anti-Semitism combined passion, in the form of
“violent threats and fantasies of mass murder,” with racial theory
within which “mass murder of the Jews was a small ‘logical’ deduc
tion.” He could, with his extraordinary charismatic talent, become
a “psychopathic god” and legitimate these feelings in others; he
also created an immediate circle of leaders w ho came to share his
conviction that in translating these fantasies into actions by an
nihilating the Jews, they were “restoring the meaning of history.”
Nazi Genocidal Institutions
A nation carrying out genocide must create new institutions and
alter existing ones. The Nazis did both. Their institutions, far from
being passive conduits, contributed greatly to the genocidal dy
namic. The actual killing institutions fell into two categories: po
lice-military ( Einsatzgruppen) and medical (the “euthanasia” killing
centers). From the beginning, there was a relationship between the
two sets of institutions, and the death camps combined these po
lice-military and medical elements. The SS was the organization
primarily responsible for the actual killing—completely in the case
of the first category, and in collaboration with medical and
pseudomedical groups in the second.
162
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
The Einsatzgruppen* were employed for special missions dealing
with intelligence work and tracking down suspected enemies at the
time both of the annexation of Austria in 1938 and of the dismem
berment of Czechoslovakia the follow ing year. But it was in Poland
that these mobile SS units began to take on a genocidal function.
There in 1939 the Einsatzgruppen were charged with the task of
annihilating Polish aristocrats, intellectuals, and priests—essen
tially destroying the entire Polish educated class.
Significantly, an attempt was made to hide the murderous policy
from the Wehrmacht (the regular German army), to which the action
was described as “suppression of all anti-Reich elements … in
particular counter-espionage.” A second wave of Einsatzgruppen
concentrated on murdering Poles and Jew s in certain areas, and in
others forcibly deported large numbers of Jews into the interior of
Poland. Some Wehrmacht leaders expressed unease or even horror
(the secret could hardly be kept) at SS actions, but tended to be
relieved rather than resentful when Hitler cleverly rearranged gov
ernance of occupied areas to place more power in the hands of the
SS—“an example of the curious military schizophrenia which so
greatly facilitated the work of the Einsatzgruppen. ” This particular
form of organizational numbing on the part of the Wehrmacht w as
characteristic throughout the bureaucracy. Also operating here
was the Nazi policy of giving the lethal work to those who, ideologi
cally and organizationally, were most inclined to do it—rather than
leaving it in the hands of those who did not.
Phus, there was an existing Einsatzgruppen tradition for genoci
dal behavior when new units w ere organized for the invasion of the
Soviet Union. In addition, volunteers for these units were encour
aged to feel that they were engaged in a holy war, a “war of
destruction” (Vernichtungskrieg) and—in Hitler’s equation ofjews
and Bolsheviks—“a final, Armageddonlike struggle against evil”
and “the crowning point of his anti-Jewish policy.”
•The term Einsatzgruppen means “task forces” but can also be translated as “special-duty
groups” or “striking force” and can convey an overtone of self-sacrifice, dedication, and
willingness to stake one’s life for one’s cause. Einsatzgruppen leaders came to include “a
curious collection—highly quaalified academics, ministerial officials, lawyers, and even a
Protestant priest and an opera singer.”
Hitler apparently took encouragement from a previous “successful” genocide: when
briefing his SS generals, he raised the rhetorical question “Who still talks nowadays of the
extermination of the Armenians?”
Momentum toward Genocide
163
Enhancing the momentum toward genocide was the ideological
mystification contained in Hitler’s early directive that “the Bolshevist/Jewish intelligentsia” must be eliminated in the service of
liquidating “all Bolshevist leaders or commissars.” That mystifi
cation provided a political rationale for murdering Jews while ren
dering amorphous additional categories of victims, which eventu
ally included “many millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians,
Byelorussians, and others”; indeed, the overall total of murder
victims “may have surpassed even the Final Solution.” The ex
panding brutality helped the Nazis muster the psychological and
political will to murder all Jews. Commanders were clearly aware
of their mission, and their reports were “couched in cold, official
language as if recording production figures for refrigerators or
numbers of vermin destroyed.”
When men in the Einsatzgruppen units showed resistance or ex
hibited psychological conflicts, a commander might invoke the
concept of the necessary ordeal for the Nazi “higher purpose,” and
also insist that each man in his unit “overcome himself”—share in
the killing and thereby form a bond of “blood guilt” that could
hold the group together. The struggle to overcome such conflicts
contributed to the extreme ferocity and grotesque thoroughness
of the mass murder. Applying unrestrained energy to the assign
ment enabled one to avoid taking in psychologically the meaning
of one’s actions. As in the case of Nazi doctors (and probably of
most genocidal perpetrators), conscientiousness came to replace
conscience. At every level, the momentum and the psychological
environment of the killing institution enabled individual men to
mobilize a sense of dedication to, and even enthusiasm for, the
task, which in turn enabled them to suppress whatever horror they
might otherwise have felt.
The institutions within the medicalized killing channels included
the hereditary health courts of the sterilization program, the vari
ous components of the “euthanasia” project culminating in the
“killing centers,” and (in part) the death camps themselves. The
hereditary health courts included practicing physicians, district
judges, and administrative health officers, all of whom tended to
be sympathetic to Nazi projects (see chapter 2). These “courts”
made decisions for sterilization which could be appealed but were
164
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
rarely reversed. Backed by the police power of a totalitarian state,
the courts provided an important institutional beginning of the
visionary biomedical scenario the Nazis were to play out. At the
same time, the courts received additional professional support
from another institution favored by the Nazis: the various centers
for “racial hygiene” established at universities throughout Ger
many, where genetically minded physicians and biologists helped
formulate, develop further, and provide sanction for the biomedi
cal vision.
That sanction was important for the jump from coercive steri
lization to the direct medical killing of the “euthanasia” project,
which required institutions of its own. These included mental hos
pitals and mental homes (both of which served regularly as a
source of victims and at times as a place where they were killed),
transportation arrangements (crucial to a secret program, and usu
ally run by the SS), transitional institutions (to which patients were
often sent from mental hospitals before being killed), and the
actual killing centers. There were also institutional procedures for
reporting of cases and for “expert evaluation” (by prominent Nazi
psychiatrists who served as “experts” and “higher experts” in
fraudulent review processes). All these institutions had such medi
cal-sounding names as “The Reich Committee for the Scientific
Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases” for
listing victims or “The Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and
Nursing Homes” for the overall arrangements for killing adults.
Children were killed mainly on the wards of general hospitals or
children’s homes; and the six adult killing centers were converted
from former nursing homes, mental hospitals, or prisons, all sur
rounded by high walls (some had been castles in the distant past)
and in isolated locations. Thus, the special institutions required
for genocide were created from bits and pieces of existing institu
tions, with added arrangements for killing; each element in the
overall structure had its professional euphemisms.
The killing centers were run by physicians, usually psychiatrists,
who were required to open the gas cock, in accordance with the
slogan “the syringe belongs in the hands of a physician” (see page
99). This was the final common pathway of both the killing and its
medicalization. But the medicalized structure in general conveyed
Momentum toward Genocide
165
to outsiders, particularly families of patients, the image of institu
tions that would heal rather than kill; and constant falsifications
(including death certificates) maintained that illusion. Medicalization could also contribute psychologically to a doctor’s capacity to
kill. One psychiatrist told how gradually increasing the dosage of
barbiturates with very young children, so that they became
progressively lethargic until they died, could give one the feeling
that “there was no killing. . . . This is not murder, it is a putting-tosleep.” While no such illusion could be maintained in the killing
of adult patients with carbon monoxide gas, the briefings arriving
doctors received from leading psychiatrists on the principle of “life
unworthy of life” also had a medical aura. And when protests,
mainly from Protestant and Catholic clergy, brought about the
closing of adult killing centers, the murders could nonetheless be
actively continued because of the existence of these medicalized
arrangements. Now adults, too, were killed in hospitals or nursing
institutions. Instead of gassing, with its telltale evidence of smoke
and smells, killing was accomplished by injection or starvation,
methods used all along in children’s programs which required no
modification.
The six Nazi death camps combined military-police and medi
calized elements. As institutions, they were derived from the
hundreds of ordinary “concentration camps” instituted almost
from the moment the Nazis seized power for “protective cus
tody” of a wide array of political enemies, including Jews; there
was consistent cruelty and considerable killing but no policy of or
machinery for systematic mass murder. The medicalized compo
nent helped provide that machinery in the form of equipment
(notably gas chambers) and personnel transferred from the “eu
thanasia” killing centers in Germany to serve as the foundation
of the death camps. Whether or not physicians were present to
supervise the actual killing, as in Auschwitz, the killing method
had been essentially developed within medical structures. Phenol
injections, another form of killing either administered or ordered
by doctors, can be said to have derived from both components,
having been utilized as a means of killing on medical blocks in
earlier concentration camps. Significantly, the first commandant
of Treblinka, where the number killed was exceeded only by
166
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
Auschwitz, was a physician transferred from a “euthanasia” kill
ing center.
Both “euthanasia” collecting centers and ordinary concentra
tion camps, then, were pre-genocidal institutions—those that readily
become or can be converted to genocidal function. Also important
pre-genocidal institutions were the ghettos where Jews were con
fined prior to being sent to death camps. First established in 1940,
the ghettos began primarily as a police action in persecuting Jews,
but also had a “medical” source in the Nazi insistence upon the
necessity of isolating Jews in order to prevent their spreading
typhus to German personnel. The high Jewish death rate in the
ghettos from brutal treatment, direct killing, disease, and increas
ingly extreme conditions of starvation came close to actual geno
cide. As in other pre-genocidal institutions, the big step to full
blown genocide came to seem almost natural.
Nazi Bureaucratic Initiative
At every stage they displayed a striking pathfinding
ability in the absence of directives, a congruity of
activities without jurisdictional guidelines, a funda
mental comprehension of the task even when there
were no explicit communications.
—Raul Hilberg
As Raul Hilberg has pointed out, the active German bureaucrats’
“pathfinding ability” was demonstrated not only in their overcom
ing all technical and organizational obstacles but also in their hav
ing the ingenuity necessary for getting the overall killing project
under way. The competitive confusions of the Nazi “bureaucratic
and administrative jungle” led to a struggle on the part of all to
achieve “fidelity to the Hitlerian vision.” The competition became
particularly fierce in the all-important realm of persecuting and
killing Jews, and one reason for the enormous power achieved by
the SS in the Nazi state was its repeatedly demonstrated capacity
for initiative greater than anyone else’s in this realm.
In the Nazi bureaucracy, “careerism could be exploited to har
ness ordinary people in the service of mass murder.” Moreover,
Momentum toward Genocide
167
the technical achievements within that careerism played a major
role in developing genocidal procedures and policies and main
taining their momentum. For instance, the development of the
mobile gassing unit or gas van depended upon contributions of
medium- and low-level bureaucrats working closely with an array
of scientists and automotive technicians who “adapted both their
talents and psyches to the new task at hand.” A chemist from the
SS “Criminal Technical Institute,” Albert Widmann, performed
animal tests with chemically pure carbon monoxide that enabled
him to recommend gas as the killing agent for the general “eutha
nasia” project. When it was found impossible to produce and
transport sufficient amounts of that gas for the large-scale killing
of Jews in the East, an alternative method was developed of pro
ducing carbon monoxide from the exhaust of special vehicles,
within which Jews could be gassed. That innovation required, first,
the imagination of the head of the same SS crime laboratory who
suggested the idea; then, an elaborate sequence of collaboration
and testing involving laboratory criminologists, chemists, and
technicians from the “euthanasia” program; and, finally, experi
ments carried out by an Einsatzgruppen unit comparing the killing
efficiency of the new gas van (favorably) with explosives also being
considered at the time.
The social dynamic of genocide was fed by competition not only
among segments of the hierarchy for dominant roles in dealing
with the Jews, but also among advocates of rival technologies.
Rudolf Höss, under whose Auschwitz leadership the cyanide gas
method was developed, was bitterly at odds with Christian Wirth,
the designer of the carbon-monoxide gas chamber: both were
ardent enough Nazis, but each felt his career depended on which
technology was deemed superior. Such professional competition
contributed not to better bridges or transportation systems, as it
might have under ordinary conditions, but to more efficient death
camps and higher totals of mass murder.
168
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
The Complicity of German Society
The destruction process required the cooperation
of every sector of German society. The bureaucrats
drew up the definitions and decrees; the churches
gave evidence of Aryan descent; the postal authori
ties carried the messages of definition, expropria
tion, denaturalization, and deportation; business
corporations dismissed their Jewish employees and
took over “Aryanized” properties; the railroads
carried the victims to their place of execution, a
place made available to the Gestapo and the SS by
the Wehrmacht. To repeat, the operation required
and received the participation of every major so
cial, political and religious institution of the Ger
man Reich.
—Richard Rubenstein
Nazi genocide took on the quality of a silent, collective crusade,
involving not just the bureaucracy of killing but German society as
a whole. As Hitler anticipated, many within German society “were
eagerly prepared to take the initiative” in carrying the program
out, many more would take part “as long as their participation
could be made part of an unthinking routine or job,” and still more
“were prepared to acquiesce in or shut their eyes to what their
government was doing.” Raul Hilberg conveys the extent and
insidiousness of this societal complicity when he speaks of “a mo
saic of small pieces, each commonplace and lusterless by itself,
… [a] progression of everyday activities, . . . file notes, memo
randa, and telegrams, embedded in habit, routine, and tradition,
. . . ordinary men . . . performing] extraordinary tasks, … a
phalanx of functionaries in public offices and private enterprises.”
Certain groups among the older Elites had particularly impor
tant functions: the Foreign Office, in fending off international criti
cism of the regime’s persecution of Jews; the Interior Ministry, in
writing most of the anti-Jewish legislation; and the intelligentsia,
in its extensive contributions to the idea structure and the technol
ogy for the mass killing.
The Ministry of Economics promulgated policies of taking from
the Jews vast economic spoils, including personal wealth and be
longings, property, businesses, and professional positions and
Momentum toward Genocide
169
practices, as we have especially noted in relation to medicine. In
this way, for Germans at every level of society the prospect of
enriching themselves was a significant motivation for justifying
persecution of Jews or their participating in it. Doctors who took
over coveted appointments, former rivals able to absorb Jewish
holdings or former workers in Jewish enterprises who were given
portions of the loot, and families able to move into Jewish apart
ments or obtain ownership of Jewish homes—all of these groups
and many more had no less at stake than party officials who ac
quired personal coffers of gold and art. Intellectuals and profes
sionals in general were an important “transmission belt” between
the fierce ideologues at the center of the regime and the general
population, rendering genocidal principles into “rational” histori
cal requirements and, as we have seen, matters of shared health
and hygiene.
In this purposeful momentum of destruction, the Nazi behe
moth absorbed “every profession, every skill, and every social
status.” And once that momentum was under way, “German bu
reaucracy was so sensitive a mechanism that … it began to func
tion almost by itself” and “did not have to be told what to do.”
This is the realm of automatism—of what observers have de
scribed, in relation to the technological and bureaucratic nuclearw’eapons arrangements, as the more or less autonomous “system,”
whose reactions can only be understood by itself.
Ordinary Germans sensed the existence of the behemoth, or
killing machine, and, feeling helpless in relation to it, readily dis
claimed responsibility for its actions. Even if one were directly part
of it, one could feel oneself merely a cog in a wheel w hose motion
one had not initiated and could not possibly stop. As a Nazi doctor
put it, “Auschwitz was an existing fact. One couldn’t really be
against it, you see. One had to go along with it whether it was good
or bad.”
Further, the behemoth created conditions previously unimagin
able. As Höhne wrote of the Einsatzgruppen, “the deeds demanded
of them took place in the vast expanses of Russia, so far distant
from their normal environment that the whole business seemed
like a drcam; those who had such a thing as a conscience could
pretend, by a process of self-deception, that what occurred had
170
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
never really taken place.” Similarly, both Nazi doctors and prison
ers have said that Auschwitz was so strange, so removed physical
