We're not ready to move to a second type of total war, or war of societies.

And that is genocide.

Now before beginning, I want to warn you that, some

of the images that we're about to see, are extremely shocking.

We have to be careful with such images

as they can become almost a voyeuristic exercise.

But I think they're justified, the use is justified to remind us exactly

what we're talking about, to take us back from the abstraction of our discussion.

Back to the real suffering and to the real consequences of these policies.

So again, the next few images that you're going to see are

going to be ones that will be extremely unpleasant and very, very shocking.

Now there is an extensive judicial and

theoretical debate on the definition of genocide.

In fact, the term only comes up in the post-war era.

For our purposes.

We can define it as the organized use of violence

in order to eradicate a population defined by some categorical characteristics.

That it is about using this organized violence

that we associate with war, in order to eliminate a

population that has been defined by a particular characteristics, by

their race, by their ethnicity, by their religion, by, whatever.

But their legal status.

Now we most distinguish between conflicts that have had genocidal consequences.

For example the conquers of the Americas.

And ones where the very point of the violence

is to kill all the member of a community.

And that's the kind of genocide that we are going to be talking about today.

Shoah, is about as clear example of a genocide as we're going to see.

It was the attempt to eliminate the Jewish people, not

as a byproduct of conquest or the unfortunate consequence of

violently erected state institution, but rather the very point of

the exercise was to produce this eradication in this death.

The goal was to completely eradicate a group of people

who's specific categorization the Nazi's were very careful in delineating.

The Nazi's spent hours, days, weeks, years, reams

of paper trying to precisely categorize what this category was.

What were the character, what were

the exact genetic characteristics of the Jewish.

Quote unquote race.

What we're

the family patterns that had to be used.

So what we see in the particular genocide is not just the violence, but prior

to that violence, this very elaborate bureaucratic attempt

to organize a population according to some characteristics.

Now, some may object to classifying the Holocaust as a war.

That is, the fear is that this

might grant a certain political legitimacy to the mass murder.

That by classifying it as a war, we remove some of the horrible.

There's also a fear that this is the first step into normalizing the inex-

Explicable.

There is a concern if we treat Auschwitz

as merely another date point in the history

of humanity we might obscure the particular evil

that occurred there and I'm very sensitive to that.

But I want to argue that it was a form.

Now even the perpetrators knew this was a different kind of violence.

And thus knew to never speak it's name and to always disguise it.

Even the perpetrators of this violence realized that

this was, if you will, beyond the norm.

That this was not something that they could speak about openly.

And in fact they're very, very careful about not

mentioning it and trying to eradicate all the evidence.

Now, some would argue that only humans go to war.

But the Holocaust is characterized by a descent into inhumanity.

And I want to argue unfortunately.

That if it were only that simple.

That in some ways there's evidence that the Holocaust was

not purely this exercise in our animal natures.

But as in other cases of war, that it was very much an expression of the humanity.

An expression of the part of humanity we

certainly do not like but we have to recognize.

The point is that Hitler, Himmler, Hess, Eichmann,

Heydrich etcetera, thought of this as a war.

They thought that the Holocaust of the Showa word as a war.

And felt that they were doing their duty in order to

preserve Germany, or the Arian Nation, from contamination, if not eradication.

Now, again.

You have to be very careful here, this

is not to justify or rationalize the horrific actions,

but actually to put them into the same

context as we have these other categories of war.

To note that this is not necessarily an aberration, but in a sense

is an extreme form of the same principles that we have been studying.

To assume the point of view of these people.

It's extremely distasteful.

But that analytical empathy is required in the way, the

first, the first step of understanding any kind of human condition.

This analytical empathy is not to humanize these people as an ethical concern,

but to humanize them, and again, so we can understand how human beings can do this.

We must also understand that the Holocaust

was something done by reasoning human beings.

These, if the Holocaust had depended on

homicidal maniacs, okay, would not have succeeded.

What the Holocaust required were normal people who were willing to

do something as horrific as the Holocaust because of their particular rationale.

If all involved had been raging beasts and

behaved without reason, the Holocaust would never have happened.

It was precisely because they were human, it's precisely because they were

quote unquote normal, ordinary people, that we need to understand the Holocaust.

As in other wars, our task is to ask how it

is that so many did what should have been impossible and unbearable?

How did normal people, how did this man engage in these actions?

How did this man that we know nothing about, but let's assume that he was just a

normal human being, how could he face this kind

of slaughter and this kind of violence?

Now, in order to understand how something like this could

happen we have to explore the notion of the enemy.

How the idea of an enemy is created that requires this kind of violence.

Now, there's a long and deep history of antisemitism.

In Europe and in Germany.

That is far too well documented to need discussion.

The German Frau who willingly stopped shopping at her Jewish neighbor's store.

The Viennese burgermeister who could not pass up

the opportunity to move into a better apartment.

The French policeman.

Helping to load trains or the Latvian thug only too willing to beat someone to death.

The polish peasant brining milk to the SS barracks.

All shared a fundamental sense supported

by many religious and political institutions that

the Jews were different, that somehow the Jews were not quite one of us!

And what's fascinating here is how this notion of the other, how this

notion of someone who was not one of us, how the notion.

That, the Jew was somehow separate,

a different category, turned into a campaign for extermination.

So how does this patron, how does this hatred that is there for hundreds of

years in Europe, turn into the horror of the shah word?

First we have to understand the leadership willing

to use every instrument available to perpetrate the horror.

That is that you have a leadership

a charismatic leader which is

willing to use all the instruments at hand in

order to create, in order to accomplish this goal.

Hitler's pathological obsession with the Jews.

And his apparent real terror of what they represented.

The Jewish peril.

This is propaganda, but for some,

and it obviously for Hitler and his inner circle.

This peril was real.

Again, that is not to excuse or rationalize them, but

this is to understand how they perceive this process.

The spark of hatred was required to set a flame.

And since the dry timber of anti semitism.

And was fan by an extremely effective machine of propaganda.

So you begin the sense with the conditions of

anti semitism, you add this leadership, and then you create

an organization which fancies hatred into the kind of

actions that weâre going to see.

The roll of the Jew as the other.

It's important example, it's important, its extreme example.

Of the dynamic of war that we have discussed from the very beginning.

One of the reasons I want to cover this horrific event is

because it shows us how far these kinds of distinctions of us.

And then can go.

The importance of differentiation the anti semitic sentiments that were already there

from a policy that lead practically

to their extermination on the European continent.

We can do this, we can try to understand the

creation of this horror, by looking at a series of stages.

The violence against the Jews began with the thuggery of the brown shirts.

The beating people in the street.

The using gangster tactics to intimidate people.

It evolved into the program of Kristallnacht in 1938, when the

violence reached a new level, and the threat reached a new level.

Then you have the systematic killing of the [UNKNOWN] group between 1939 and 1941.

This was, again, an escalation of violence using clear violence

in, and war like violence against the population.

But it culminates with the industrialized assembly

line mass murder of 1942, and 1944.

We have to understand that the final solution

is a product of a series of stages.

If a product of this very process of war,

and the dehumanization that is produced by the war.

I want to argue, and I think most of the literature is on my side, that the

Nazis do not begin their anti-semitic campaigns in

the 1920s with the slaughter of millions in mind.

The goal was to make Germany Judenfrei, that is free of Jews.

And as offensive this was, it began with an emphasis on

forced migration through systematic intimidation and

persecution, and, relatively, relatively, limited violence.

What we see here is, again, disgusting, but it was not

the kind of systematic extermination that we're going to see later.

There were Jews in concentration camps.

From early in the 1930s.

But they were not the exclusive focus of persecution.

They were there along with various other groups.

Particularly political opposition.

So the Jews had been singled out.

But not for the kind of process that we're going to see later.

I want to argue that Autumn of 1938 is a clear turning point.

Some have argued that the fiscal pressures on the state required the appropriation

of whatever Jewish capital and resources remained

in Germany, that we can understand Kristallnacht.

Not just as an explosion of hatred, but actually as almost a material grab.

In order to grab the amounts of

Jewish capital and Jewish properties, that were still available.

Even after five years of intimidation.

There was also in the autumn, by the autumn of 1938,

a frustration with the reluctance of other countries to allow greater immigration.

Let us understand this.

And it's very, very important that the Nazis

were trying to push the Jewish population out during the 1930s.

And one of the reasons they were not able to do so, is

because of the rest of the world, would not take this population in.

The rest of the world also suffered from this kind of anti-semitism.

And refused, in a sense, to accept this population the Germans.

Then, in his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939.

Hitler starts threatening something very different, and he makes explicit the

threat of speaking about the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

This is one of the first instances that we have of this vision.

Not just of making Germany or Europe Jewed and fried, free of Jews.

But rather actually exterminating the Jews.

Now, after the war begins and the [UNKNOWN] group are unleashed

on Poland, there is no apparent systematic campaign of extermination.

That is, we have an incredible amount of

violence, we have it directed at a particular population.

But its managerial systemality, if you will.

Its systemization had not quite developed yet.

The Jewish population is forced into ghettos, but appears that

this is really a first step in their forceful removal.

Towards the east, in order to provide

Lebensraum for German migrants, into the Polish countryside.

So, it seems that the move of the Jewish population, for example,

in Poland, into ghettos, is not as a step prior to their extermination.

But prior to their forced movement, far into the

east, so their land could be taken over by Germans.

Now, let us not misunderstand what this move to the

east meant; it was not expected to be a successful

migration, in that this Jewish population would then prosper in

the east, they were meant to be pushed in the east.

To literally starve to death they were going to be

pushed out these territories and left to their own devices.

And left without the kind of tools for their own survival.

So there was no good intention in any, in any of these

but it was still not yet that systematic industrial approach of extermination.

The invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941 marks the beginning

of this third phase of the Shao the one that we are most familiar with.

For the next year, a part of the German

war machinery was devoted to the systematic killing of Jews.

As the invaders moved west.

So, we begin to see how this process of

killing a population becomes more organized, if you will.

The killing of Jews appeared first to be part of a general debolshevikization.

campaign.

But by late 1941, Jewish identity in ending of

itself would override any other consideration including age or gender.

That is, that what we see is the

intensification of this category, the centralization of this category.

As the main purpose of war.

This, this process, this [UNKNOWN], this, this the, this Holocaust

by bullets, if you will, resulted in the deaths of more than one million Jews as

well as gypsies, Soviet POWs, all sorts of populations.

But the center category was clearly the Jews.

In nineteen forty two, we see a change.

At the beginning of this year, 75% of the

Jews that would be killed will still be alive.

But by the beginning of 1943 only 25 were still living.

That is 1942 is a clear moment when a campaign of harassment, a

campaign of violence, a campaign of

death becomes a campaign of institutionalized extermination.

We begin with the Wannsee Conference of earlier 1942 where the Nazi leadership, a

large part of the Nazi leadership, meets

to institutionalize this killing and changes its method.

It is it expresses its frustration.

With the inefficiencies of things like, the [UNKNOWN]

group and they're not simply getting the job done.

Moreover, interestingly, they recognize that the

psychological costs on the troops are considerable

and at the [UNKNOWN] Conference, a new level of evil is reached.

And you get Operation Dried Heart begins in camps

at Sobidor, Treblinka, Mojonick, as well as those Achellno.

In Auschwitz.

These become operational between 1942, 1942 and 1944.

And an estimated 3 million Jews are

killed in these extermination camps.

These death factories.

Now, again it's important to understand how

the extermination camps were created and functioned.

and it's important again to emphasize that here.

People were not killed because they had something someone

else wanted, although of course there was the looting

of all personal possessions, of gold

teeth, of the very skin of these human beings.

But that was not in a sense the purpose of it.

That was these.

These material gains, if you will, were

a positive collateral to the kind of extermination.

Since great efforts were made to keep this secret, the murder was not

necessarily functional in that it could not be used to intimidate or terrorize.

That is, we're not seeing this kind of violence as almost

a functional part of the imposition of terror on a population because.

This all has to be kept very, very secret.

Killing was its own objective, and the reason was a perceived identity.

That the whole point of this exercise was to kill those who had been identified.

As something.

Here we come to racial warfare, at its most extreme.

Now, where we have many many accounts of

daily brutality on an individual level from camp guards.

Most testimonies confirm our image of, [LAUGH] bureaucratic indifference.

[LAUGH] That, this was not a process driven in a sense by an

animalistic side, but rather, facilitated by

a bureaucratic distance, by a bureaucratic rationality.

The method of killing squads such as Babi

Yar, used, through most of 1941, brought challenges.

They were, and again, I apologize for having to speak it in

this way but I think it's important

that we understand how the Nazis perceived this.

There were logical concerns with body disposal, for example.

So the kinds of killing squads we see here.

That always left the problem of what to

do with this masses, this mass number of corpses.

There was a difficulty of killing innocence and

maintaining a descensiy and upstanding with such and obligation.

That is, that the germans face almost

A personal problem.

In that the soldiers, even the most blood thirsty, even those who

had been convinced by this propaganda, are shocked by this continual, process.

In this,

Created a new need for a method of synchronized killing.

That is, that the structure of the extermination camps.

The structure of Auschwitz has to be seen almost

as a strategic shift given the

Frustrations with the old fashionably way of killing.

Now, the gemination campaign of nineteen thirty nine have provided a method.

And very individuals groups were quite enthusiastic, and were out of patience.

And when one reads this memos, there saltatory about their production quarters.

How the can improve the process.

What they wanted to do.

Was to create a smoothly running mass

murder organization, but on an extraordinary scale.

Now, each camp shared some of the same characteristics.

Contact with the victims was minimized to the initial arrival and very

soon after, victims would be funneled into a path, finishing in their deaths.

So, there was relatively small contact between the killers.

And the killed.

The removal of bodies was done by

the sonderkommando, or prisoners, who had gained a

short extension of their lives by doing,

what can only be described, as the unspeakable.

The actual number of personnel involved could be kept

at a minimum, making the process of recruitment easier.

You did not need to find millions of mass killers, you

could create an industrial process in a sense, where a few individuals.

Could actually accomplish this.

The process was to de-personalize as much as possible.

While the personnel were encouraged to think of their work as normal.

Even if unpleasant.

the lesson here is Holocaust teachers that how a tool of violence.

Can be adapted in apparently rational ways.

The true horror of the Holocaust for me is that it did

not depend on orders from evil men, but how easily the means

of war, the rationality of violence of war could be applied

to and end, that any rational person would reject out of hand.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Genocide

Paradoxes of War

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