20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Holocaust

Holocaust Emil L. Fackenheim H olocaust is the term currently most widely employed for the persecution of the jewish people by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, first in Germany itself and subsequently in Nazi-occupied Europe, culminating in "extermination" camps and resulting in the murder of nearly six million jews. However, the Hebrew term Shoah (total destruction) would be more fitting, since Holocaust also connotes "burnt sacrifice." It is true that, like ancient Moloch worshipers, German Nazis and their non-German henchmen at Auschwitz threw children into the flames alive. These were not, however, their own children, thrown in acts of sacrifice, but those of jews, thrown in acts of murder. Is the Holocaust unique? The concept unprecedented is preferable, as it refers to the same facts but avoids not only well-known difficulties about the concept of uniqueness but also the temptation of taking the event out of history and thus mystifying it.1 To be sure, Auschwitz was "like another planet," in the words of "Katzetnik 135683," the pen name of the novelist Yechiel Dinur, that is, a world of its own, with laws, modes of behavior, and 400 HOLOCAUST even a language of its own. Even so, as unprecedented, rather than unique, it is placed firmly into history. Historians are obliged, so far as possible, to search for precedents; and thoughtful people, by no means historians only, are obliged to ask if the Holocaust itself may become a precedent for future processes, whether as yet only possible or already actual. Manes Sperber, for example, has written: "Encouraged by the way Hitler had practiced genocide without encountering resistance, the Arabs [in 1948] surged in upon the nascent Israeli nation to exterminate it and make themselves its immediate heirs.''2 The most obvious recent precedent of the Holocaust is the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in World War I. Like the Nazi genocide of the Jews in World War II, this was an attempt to destroy a whole people, carried out under the cover of a war with maximum secrecy, and with the victims being deported to isolated places prior to their murder, all of which provoked few countermeasures or even verbal protests on the part of the civilized world. Doubtless the Nazis both learned from, and were encouraged by, the Armenian precedent. But unlike the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust was intended, planned, and executed as the "final solution" of a "problem." Thus, whereas, for example, the roundup of Armenians in Istanbul, the very heart of the Turkish empire, was discontinued after a while, Nazi Germany, had it won the war or even managed to prolong it, would have succeeded in murdering every Jew. North American Indians have survived in reservations; Jewish reservations in a victorious Nazi Empire are inconceivable. Thus the Holocaust may be said to belong, with other catastrophes, to the species genOCide. Within the species, defined as intended, planned, and largely executed extermination, it is without precedent and, thus far at least, without sequel. It is-here the term really must be employed-unique. Equally unique are the means without which this project could not have been planned or carried out. These include: a scholastically precise definition of the victims; juridical procedures, enlisting the finest minds of the legal profession, aimed at the total elimination of the victims' rights; a technical apparatus, including murder trains and gas chambers, and, most importantly, a veritable army not only of actual murderers but also of witting and unwitting accomplices-clerks, lawyers, journalists, bank managers , army officers, railway conductors, entrepreneurs, and an endless list of others. All these means and accomplices were required for the how of the "Final Solution." Its why required an army of historians, philosophers, and theologians . The historians rewrote history. The philosophers refuted the idea HOLOCAUST 401 that mankind is human before it is Aryan or non-Aryan. And the theologians were divided into Christians who made Jesus into an Aryan and neo-pagans who rejected Christianity itself as non-Aryan. (Their differences were slight compared to their shared commitments.) Such were the shock troops of this army. Equally necessary, however, were its remaining troops: historians,philosophers , and theologians who knew differently but betrayed their calling by holding their peace. What was the why of the Holocaust? Even the shock troops never quite faced it, although they had no reason or excuse for not doing so. As early as 1936 Julius Streicher was...