How Could The Holocaust Even Happen, Requiring Such Evil Actions From Ordinary People? A Scholar Attempts To Explain
Review of How Could This Happen: Explaining The Holocaust, by Dan McMillan
Dan McMillan’s book is a unique addition to the compendium of books about the Holocaust. In it, he attempts to explain how such a nightmarish event as the Holocaust, requiring the tacit and real complicity of thousands of people, could possibly have happened. And he also wants to understand if the Germans were uniquely capable of perpetrating these atrocities, or if it could have happened anywhere.
He comes to the question from a sociological and historical perspective, as he is a historian who has studied the Holocaust for many decades. Attempting to explain such a horrific event is quite an undertaking, but he proves himself up to the task.
Unfortunately, for most people, explaining the Holocaust is just too scary. We don’t really want to know that this is something that nearly anyone could be capable of. We also see echoes of this persecution around us in the modern world, with present-day persecutions of other groups based solely on their genetics or other personal characteristics.
The Rwandan Genocide is another event which terrifies us all because, though much smaller in scope and time period, it was also perpetrated by ordinary citizens, and not governments. So the question we must all ask ourselves is, would we also look the other way or actively participate in an atrocity because the crowd encourages us? The answer to that question is complicated and elusive.
The author succeeds in proving that there was no special “German Gene” or “German Defect” that made this people uniquely capable of committing such atrocities. And it makes perfect sense that the Jewish people as a whole seek to do everything they can to prevent this from ever happening to their group or anyone else’s.
We have previously published a story by a member of the American Muckrakers PAC, in which he compared the persecutions being perpetrated upon the LGBTQ+ community, in particular the trans portion of the acronym, to the harbingers of Hitler’s Holocaust.
Hitler’s persecution also started small, with banning Jews from participating in sports, but quickly expanded in scope and size. The recent rulings by the heavily Christian/Catholic Supreme Court, which declared discrimation against LGBTQ+ people in terms of providing services to them totally legal, is one way in which this group is being persecuted in the present day.
According to McMillan, there were a number of reasons that the Holocaust was able to happen. The first is blind, raw luck, as applied to Hitler. He managed to, simply by brazenness in certain attacks, prove to his people that he was somehow beyond reproach, above fault, and working in the service of a higher power. There were actually quite a large number of German non-Jews who literally replaced images of Christian deities with images of Hitler, with prayers to the great “Leader” to accompany this replacement. There were literally possibly thousands of Germans who believed that Hitler was on par with God.
While there are many who would say this is impossible, it did, in fact happen.
Another reason for the Holocaust and the godlike status of Hitler was that he survived multiple assassination attempts, including one supposedly secretly carried out by the Catholic Church, involving a suitcase bombing at an event. This bombing killed several other people, but unfortunately not Hitler. All of these things elevated him to godlike status in the minds of the German people.
Killing By Easily Hidden Means
Another travesty from the Holocaust is how carefully they went about concealing their crimes. They would create mass graves of people who had been shot, either in the back of the head or straight on, and then they would burn the bodies, thus destroying the evidence of their crimes, and at the same time denying the people who they felt were less worthy than animals, from a proper burial, funeral, or even remembrance.
It came to a point where the Jews knew they were being exterminated, and some of them would ask for the death of themselves or relatives, to be quick and preferably painless. Since they were going to die anyway, and they knew it, this was not unreasonable.
What a horrible situation to be in, where you know that it is only a matter of time before you will be dead, and asking for a merciful killing from the SS officer in charge of you! The Jews who arrived at the concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, were the ones forced to take the new arrivals off of the trains. They were made to send them to their fates, which they knew, without causing them to panic by revealing their fate to them.
Women and children, particularly those with young children, along with the elderly, were sent to their deaths right off the train. The Jews who greeted them had to explain to them to take off their jewelry, remove their clothing, and escort them to the killing area. Many of them were simply burned to death. The jewelry was collected and stolen by the Nazis for their own profit or use. Homes and businesses were also confiscated from Jews.
The most common types of death were shootings in the back of the head, followed by cremation, killing by carbon monoxide poisoning with a tail pipe of a truck hooked up to the window, again followed by cremation, and straight cremation. These types of killings, followed by bodies disposed of by burning to ash, are among the reasons why there is so little remaining evidence or knowledge of how many people were really killed. Everything is just an estimate, and there is no way to know.
Something that I found interesting was his explanation of whether people knew what was happening. It would have been literally impossible not to know, as everyone had Jewish neighbors and friends who simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. While many Germans denied having any knowledge, there was enough implication to understand what was actually happening. Most Germans, though, were not direct participants in the killings, so could claim to have not known about them. However, at a certain point, it did become widespread knowledge.
Slave Labor Or Something Else?
There are some who believe that the Holocaust was a large prison slave labor camp, where most of those who perished did so because they were worked to death and not fed very well. This would appear to have been impossible, for several reasons.
First of all, there were not many who left the trains alive and remained so. The train rides themselves often resulted in the death of many passengers, due to the lack of food and water on the trains, which could often take days to arrive at the destination. So, many of the arriving Jews and others were already dead when the trains pulled in.
The Jews and others, including the mentally disabled, the Romani, priests, and others who spoke out against the regime, were brought to the camps in large numbers. If they managed to be chosen for slave labor, they were not fed much at all. Thin soup and small amounts of bread were their daily diet, because the goal was not to use them as slaves. The goal was for them to die quickly. Once they had outlived their usefulness as a slave laborer, they too were sent to the executioner.
There were at least a few corporations, however, who did use Jews for slave labor. However, compared to the number who perished without ever laboring, their numbers were relatively few.
The Failed Revolution and Hampering of Democracy for Germany
One of the main reasons given by McMillan for the Holocaust has to do with the failed revolution in the 1880s, followed by the demonization of democracy by the elites of Germany. The elites were loathe to allow the people to have any power, and they were able to delay a true democratic system until well after World War 2.
During the time period before the first World War, Germany’s elites made every attempt possible to blame the creation of the ongoing socialist movement on the Jews, as well as blaming them for all of the social ills in Germany. Of course, you can understand in hindsight that it was the elites themselves who were responsible for the social ills there, through lack of justice, classism, and lack of social reform which was being demanded by the lower classes of Germans.
Such demonization by the elites had the intended effect of uniting all of the Germans against the perceived enemy that was the Jews. They also were extremely nationalistic, and tried to unite the German people against the lower classes, particularly the working classes, as well. They would not allow those in the lower classes to climb the social ladder, so to speak, or to be given suffrage or worker’s rights. Being the bosses in charge of the workers, they treated their workers in the same unequal and disparaging way as workers were treated in America before the Labor Movement gave workers rights and equality under the law.
While there was a sham democracy in place at this time, where the government lacked legitimacy and the support of the people, it was easily defeated and removed by the Nazis once they took power.
The Great Depression, which at first hit Germany very hard, was another reason why the Nazis rose to power in the first place. People were desperate to escape the terrible Depression which had settled upon their country, leaving the population with a 30% unemployment rate, along with the desperation that this caused.
When Hitler and the Nazi party came into power, they were able to stop most of the effects of the Great Depression, through enslaving the Jews and other groups, and using this to bring the people back into prosperity. This also contributed to him being seen as having godlike wisdom and power.
Working Towards the Leader
Another peculiarity of the Holocaust was the desire of the German people, and particularly those in government, to work “towards the Leader.” This meant carrying out what they presumed to be his plans. This is one reason why there were so many injustices perpetrated against the Jews in Germany. While Hitler rarely explicitly stated his intentions toward the Jews, many of those in his government took matters into their own hands, perpetrating atrocities that he did not directly order, but when they were reported to him, he was often pleased with them.
So, while he may never have directly said, “Kill everyone who disembarks at Auschwitz,” or “Kill every person of Jewish birth that comes into your presence,” his subordinates acted as though he had said those things. It is quite amazing how little Hitler actually said in public, considering how his party members interpreted his words to the worst extent possible.
World War I and the Devaluing of Human Life
Another quirk of the Holocaust is that many of the members of the Nazi party had participated in World War I, Germany’s first attempt to, in essence, take over the world. For modern readers, the meaning and import of this is likely to be missed.
World War I was probably the most horrific war ever fought in terms of loss of human life and the devaluing thereof. Human beings were, essentially and practically, cannon fodder and nothing more. This was the first war using gunners behind machine guns, where large groups of men on foot would rush toward the machine gun fire, most of them being mowed down quickly and easily by the gunmen. This led to an incredible loss of life.
It also lead to the devaluing of human life by those who survived this war, of which Hitler and many of those in his Nazi party, were a part. This caused these men to consider murdering other men part of the “toughness” they had gained and were quite proud of.
The Height Of Eugenics, Anti-Semitism, and Racism Marked An Entire Race For Death
Racism and anti-Semitism were also at an all-time high in the decades leading up to Hitler’s rise to power. This was partly because of the social Darwinism and Eugenics, which were popular in elite circles at the time.
Many people who were anti-Semitic literally believed that Jews were a completely different race of people, not worthy of life. This was similar to the eugenics arguments used against the Negro slaves and Black people in general, many decades earlier in the time of Charles Darwin, in the 1850s. His book gave many people all of the excuses that they needed to treat Black people and those of the lower classes as if they were less than human, not deserving of any rights or even consideration.
The resurgence of this persistent myth, which still exists among the elites of today, is partly responsible for the Holocaust. In order to so devalue a people, in order to mark them all for death, it becomes necessary to consider them as somehow different from oneself. The easiest way to do that is to pretend that they are not human. Then, when they are murdered en masse, those responsible do not feel any guilt, or anything at all really. To them, as during Darwin’s time, they feel as much remorse as when they kill a bug or a cow, which is to say, they feel nothing.
The Germans Who Knew And Those Who Claimed To Have Not Known
There were many Germans who were interviewed after the Holocaust. Many of these who did not directly participate denied having any knowledge of what was happening. This may or may not have been true. Those who did not know or have relatives who killed Jews directly may well not have known. It is this collective know-nothingness that allowed the Holocaust to cause as much damage as it did. There were also many who knew what was happening, though perhaps not the extent of it, who chose to look the other way. They chose consciously to aid and abet the Holocaust. Of course, there are those who perpetrated the killings.
Unfortunately, very few of the members of the Nazi party kept journals or diaries or any sort of record really of what they were feeling. The few that did showed a complete dispassion for what they were participating in, so deep were the eugenicist feelings. The few diarists even spoke cordially of their Jewish subjects, who they would very shortly thereafter order the execution of. From a psychological standpoint, this is something that may not be explainable. What made them so cruel and dispassionate towards their fellow human beings? How were they able to hold onto this dispassionate, uncaring feeling for such a long time? This, I cannot understand.
Had It Not Been For Many Coincidences and Happenstance, the Holocaust May Not Have Happened
Many of the causes mentioned above were just about dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time. Or of the German people going along with Hitler because he had saved them from the horrors of the Great Depression that other countries were feeling quite harshly. But why did this happen in Germany and not somewhere else? The author contends that it could have happened anywhere, and that it was not specific to any one race of people.
He states, “…most human beings lack a moral compass and feel no moral obligation toward those who fall outside some group with which they identify.” Ouch.
He also says, “…the specifically German causes of the Holocaust, although they were indispensable to making it happen, don’t make the Germans seem terribly different from other peoples, which is precisely the point: they weren’t and they aren’t. Not some deep and widespread flaw in German ‘national psychology,’ but rather accidents of history and partisan strife, combined to make possible Hitler’s rise to power and the loyalty of millions to him.”
Many participated in the Holocaust in various ways, but the elites were the most responsible. They were the ones who worked the Jews to dearth in the hundreds of corporations that used them as slave labor. They were the ones who helped the most in exterminating the Jews of Europe. They were responsible for leading German society in all its institutions and contexts. They were the ones who had the power and political clout to potentially speak out about the atrocities. Or at the very least not aid and abet them. Even if they didn’t speak out, they could have chosen not to enslave Jews for their own selfish gain.
Soldiers, managers, and bureaucrats were the ones responsible for organizing the Jews’ discrimination, deportation, and murder in their roles as civil servants. There were in fact many who were able to help the Jews that were sent to them escape. The famous example of Schindler’s List is well-known, but there were others who performed similar acts of bravery without recognition. Once they were found out, they shared in the fate of those they could not save. But outside of a few brave souls who helped Jews escape these atrocities, most Germans either looked the other way or actively participated.
Looking back at what happened, and trying to make sense of it, is not an easy task. The elites in Germany would have had much more power to intervene, if only by remonstrating their friends and relatives who were becoming mass murderers. Without their silence, the Holocaust would have been much less in scope and breadth.
The Final Question: What Would You Have Done?
There are many in contemporary society who look back upon the Holocaust and think how terrible the Germans were, and how if they found themselves in that situation, they would have acted differently. However, the reality is that most people would have done the same as the Germans did were they faced with the same circumstances. Scientific studies in the modern era have shown this time and again. When people face no reprisal for harming others, they will harm them with abandon.
The most famous example of this is the ‘Milgram experiment,’ which was performed in the 1960s and has been duplicated since then in other settings. In this study, subjects were ordered to provide painful electric shocks to test subjects who were actually actors and not being harmed. Most of the test subjects would continue to administer the shocks, even when the subjects screamed in pain, if they were ordered to do so.
Another well-known experiment, called the Stanford Prison Experiment, put students into a prisoner and guard situation. Within a very short amount of time, 6 days to be exact, the “guards” had become so abusive to the “prisoners,” and the prisoners so anxious, that the experiment had to be terminated.
< a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(1981_film)”>A movie from 1981, which debuted in that year and returned as an after-school special two years later, attempted to show how easy it was for Hitler to convince Germans to kill for him. It is based on the true experience of a teacher in the 1960s who attempts to explain the Holocaust to his students by essentially recreating some of the basic principles of it in the classroom. Giving one student power over the others, forcing everyone to adopt a certain posture and mode of dress, bullying by students in order to force compliance to the new rules.
The teacher calls this new student movement The Wave. One of the students publishes and expose in the school newspaper, for which she is bulled and ostracized. This actually happened in the 1960s, and was an experiment put on by Ron Jones at a school in Palo Alto California. As the experiment progressed, teachers and some students asked Mr. Jones to end the experiment, as they felt it was doing irreparable damage to the students.
At the end of the movie, everyone was expecting to meet their new leader, and watch a speech by him. In the final climatic scene, a speech by Hitler is presented to the students who were participants in The Wave movement. This was the way this teacher tried to answer the question as to how the Holocaust could have happened. It had nearly happened with them, though they were not murdering anyone, just bullying and ostracizing fellow students.
But herein we can see, as well as in this excellent book, how it was not some special quality of the German people that allowed them to perpetrate the Holocaust. It was just a sort of coincidence that it occurred in Germany, but not somewhere else.
The author’s concluding statement it quite powerful, and I will conclude this summary portion with his words: “Demonizing the Germans is unworthy of us because it denies both their humanity and ours. We are the Germans, and they are we.”
Final Thoughts
This book is highly recommended, and is a fascinating and engaging read. It was easy to read and digest the information, and a highly complex topic was distilled to be understandable to anyone. I would highly recommend that you read it as well, if you are at all interested in the Holocaust and how such a vast and pernicious genocide could have happened. With a better understanding of how it could have happened, it becomes more likely that it WON’T ever happen again.
This book is rated FIVE STARS:
Banner Image: How Could This Happen book cover. Image Credit – Basic Books
Original star graphics courtesy of vecteezy.com
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