The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust 3031309189, 9783031309182

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The Degradation of Ethics through the Holocaust Paul E. Wilson

The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust

Paul E. Wilson

The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust

Paul E. Wilson Shaw University Raleigh, NC, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-30918-2    ISBN 978-3-031-30919-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I The Genocidal Priming Phase of the Holocaust   1 1 Introduction  3 Shades of Nietzsche and Heidegger in the Holocaust   5 The Holocaust as One Way Hatred Grows   7 Genocide is a Process  11 2 A  ntisemitism is a Vicious Racism 17 Introduction  17 Jews, Christians, and Antisemitism in Supersessionism  18 Antisemitism is a Racism  21 The Insidious Side of Institutionalized Racism  22 Antisemitism as Hate  27 Conclusion  31 3 D  enial of Rights as a Prelude to Entitlement 35 Introduction  35 Personal Property Laws and Racism  36 Genocide and Deprivation of Victim’s Rights  37 How Individuals Come to Be Bearers of Rights: A General Account  39 A Conceptual Framework for the Expansion and Contraction of Rights  44

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Contraction of Rights: The Slippery Slope of Jews’ Loss of Personal Property rights in German  46 Ghettos and the Right to Personal Liberty  51 Denial of Rights and Statelessness  52 Conclusion  53 4 P  ropaganda for Genocide 57 Introduction  57 Who Were the Propagandists?  64 Hitler as a Propagandist  66 Gerhard Kittle  67 Joseph Goebbels  68 Walter Grundmann  70 Julius Streicher  71 Heinrich Himmler  72 What Shadows of Propaganda were Cast?  74 The German Propaganda Diet  75 Effects Upon the Prisoners in the Cave of Ignorance  77 Conclusions  78 5 S  elf-Entitlement for the Chosen Few 83 Introduction  83 A Protocol to Distinguish the Us and Them in the Holocaust  85 When Rights become a Matter of Life and Death  88 Anatomy of a Mass Murder  91 Historical Convergences and Logical Intersections  94 License to Kill  96 Conclusion  98 6 T  he Case of the Aryan Jesus Dogma: Enlarging Entitlement through Propaganda 103 Introduction 103 The Religious Appeal of an Aryan Jesus 105 The Theological Support of an Aryan Jesus 107 An Aryan Jesus Creed Reconstructed 109 The Efficacy and Logic of the Case for an Aryan Jesus 114 Conclusion 117

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Part II The Peak Phase of Genocide in the Holocaust 119 7 T  he Holocaust and the Ideal of Purity121 Introduction 121 The Definition of Genocide 123 The Scale of Genocide 124 The Failure of Purification as the Ideal of Genocide 126 Crafting Moral and Practical Responses to Genocide 128 Conclusion 130 8 R  esistance and Neighborly Aid133 Introduction 133 Becoming Targets of Genocidal Violence 135 Resistance for Dignity’s Sake 137 Heroic Resistance that Dignifies Human Rights 148 Assessing the Utility of Resistance 150 The Practicality and Justice of Resistance 153 Conclusion 158 9 T  he Case of the Muselmänner: A Study in the Loss and Reclamation of Dignity161 Introduction 161 How the Dignified Should be Treated 162 Who the Muselmänner Were 163 Denial of Needs and Deprivation of Dignity 166 Measured Satisfaction of Needs for the Reclamation of Dignity 168 Conclusion 170 10 E  thical Gray Zones in Genocidal Killing Camps173 Introduction 173 The Emergence of Ethical Gray Zones 174 Entrapment in an Ethical Gray Zone 175 Ethics in the Gray Zones 177 Return from the Gray Zones 184 Transformations 184 Conclusion 186

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11 B  ystanders to Genocide191 Introduction 191 Bystanders and Complicity 194 Martin Niemöller ’s Courage and Regrets 196 A J. Topf & Sons: Manufacturing Hygiene 198 Complicity of the Swastika Bedecked German Church 202 Complicity of the Silent Neighboring Nations 207 Conclusion 210 12 Cry Genocide!213 Introduction 213 When and Why to Give the Cry: “Genocide!” 216 The Choice to Give the Cry: “Genocide!” 218 Some Risks in Raising the Cry of Genocide 223 Conclusion 226 13 Postscript229 Works Cited233 Index

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PART I

The Genocidal Priming Phase of the Holocaust

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Degradation Ethics Through the Holocaust is a morality story that examines the process within a genocide. Hard core Holocaust deniers claim that the Holocaust as a single event never happened. To recognize that the Holocaust like other genocides is a process is to recognize that it was a complex historical event unfolding over time and involving thousands of moral actors making thousands of moral decisions. At each stage

I would like to thank the Faculty Resource Network (FRN) of New York University for granting me an FRN Remote Scholar Fellowship for Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and Fall 2022 to continue research on this manuscript. Resources in the Bobst Library enabled me to reply to comments and suggestions offered on the project. Administration at Shaw University have been supportive of my research by granting me time in my schedule for research while still teaching and acting as a school administrator. The Walter Clinton Jackson Library of Greensboro, North Carolina, has granted me an area teacher library card for research. I am grateful to reviewers and colleagues who have commented during the writing and revision of essays and chapters that now appear in this book. Thanks go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for inviting me to attend Programs on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust (PERH) Summer Seminars in 2016 and 2021. In addition, I would like to thank Editor Amy Invernizzi for choosing to review my work for publication with Palgrave Macmillan.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_1

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moral actors were making ethical decisions that would further or stymie the process leading up to the mass murder of people. Viewed individually the impact of a decision just to engage in racial stereotyping can be underestimated. In combination these decisions to act in specific ways did culminate in the mass murder of over six million Jews and others. What Primo Levi said of the Holocaust is a truth of the morality story of genocide: It happened before, so it could happen again. If there is a banality within the process of the Holocaust, it seems to lie in the banality of moral decisions that contribute to a genocide or that fail to halt progress toward it. The decision to stereotype members of other ethnic groups or the decision not to condemn that practice may seem trite in comparison to the decision to persecute or even kill a member of another ethnic group. In a genocide the former decision becomes a causal condition that contributes to the outcome. On December 29, 1972, Edward Lorenz posed a question for the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” 1 Briefly stated, Lorenz, a meteorologist, surmised that there was a strong possibility that an event in Brazil could be a causal factor contributing to an event in Texas. Others like Norman Gladwell have called attention to the monumental effects that can follow from slight changes.2 This volume examines in context the ethical decisions of individuals, collectives and states that happened through the stages of the Holocaust. When we begin an in-depth analysis of events in a genocide like the Holocaust, we see persons resolving their ethical dilemmas by harming others. Or we find persons forced to react to the harm intended for them. We may have read the same history script so often that we have become desensitized to wrongdoing it recounts. Rather than have our moral hackles raised, we may respond, “So what? How often must one repeat that killing is wrong and is to be condemned?” I believe victims and survivors of genocidal violence have one answer: Repeat that mass killing is wrong. Repeat it until it stops.

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Shades of Nietzsche and Heidegger in the Holocaust The next chapter of this study investigates antisemitism as a pervasive moral issue in the twentieth century. In the opening chapter of his book, “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” the philosopher Jonathan Glover argues for the abiding influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on modern ethics. 3 Here I shall not attempt to engage with the philosophical arguments of Glover regarding Nietzsche. I take Nietzsche to be a philosopher who presents a philosophical vision in the tradition of Parmenides, Plato, or Hegel and other continental philosophers. Nietzsche does not proceed with his philosophical discourse as an analytical philosopher. I respect Nietzsche for his analysis of the human condition and his value theory, but I join those who take issue with his world view and its implications for normative ethical theory. In Nietzsche’s world view ethical values are relativized and traditional ethical theories like deontology or consequentialism can become expressions of an ancient will to power. Nietzsche says, “good and evil that are not transitory, do not exist.”4 From my reading of Nietzsche I shall call attention to two points only. First, Nietzsche offers us a naturalistic vision of the condition of the world that is beyond good and evil. Nietzsche writes, “For all things have been baptized in the well of eternity and are beyond good an evil; and good and evil themselves are intervening shadows and damp depressions and drifting clouds.”5 That said, in Nietzsche’s view the value judgments we make regarding good and evil in a world of eternal recurrence become very anthropocentric. For my part I am persuaded of another world view, a panentheistic world view wherein there are absolute values of good and evil. Hence, I assume everyday notions of duty, consequences, and virtue are not relativized but still make sense as values. Second, within Nietzsche’s world view there is a respect of power for the sake of power. This will-to-power has intrinsic and extrinsic value insofar as it elevates the power of the one who exerts it. Also, will-to-power furthers the ends of those who would exert power over nature and others. Nietzsche says, “what the people believe to be good and evil, that betrays to me an ancient will to power.”6 I surmise that will-to-power is compatible with hatred but not compassion. I suppose compassion to be a virtue, not a vice.

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Glover also includes in his discussion of twentieth-century philosophy a detailed account of the philosophy and lifestyle of Martin Heidegger. American philosopher and ethicist, John Roth commented that philosophers bear a great weight of responsibility for not subjecting to philosophical and ethical scrutiny their role in the forces that give rise to genocide or the Holocaust.7 It is possible to overlook the glaring inconsistencies and harmful tendencies in the behavior of some philosophers, but that oversight can represent a serious lapse of moral judgment. Glover’s discussion of Heidegger’s Nazi membership seems to provide the evidence that Roth is right. Heidegger was responsible for failing to condemn the racism and cruelty that Nazis were engendering. Heidegger embraces his membership in the Nazi party, and his lifestyle and associations conform to the ideal of Nazism. For instance, as a loyal Nazi Heidegger rejected associations with his own mentor, Edmund Husserl.8 This was not an insignificant social faux pau. Rather it was a choice of Heidegger to uphold the values of the Nazis. Some philosophers take refuge in the obtuse, while they ignore their responsibility to speak out for social justice or the good. Later in the next chapter I shall speak of first and second grade racism. If one supposes Heidegger’s is a borrowed, second grade racism, it only confirms his willingness not to engage reflectively with his social and political commitments. It is no complement to say that a philosopher, a reflective thinker, would forego his own reflection upon such a monumental social issue as antisemitism, but it appears that Heidegger did so. If I am correct in my understanding of Glover, I suppose he would agree. Heidegger has been faulted by Roth for his failure to rise to the occasion and denounce the Nazis as perpetrators of genocide. I see that as a clear omission of his moral obligation. Only a passing observation can be offered here regarding the substance of Heidegger’s philosophy. I take Heidegger to be offering the academy an elaborate ontology where individual existence is situated within the common or herd. This philosophy was challenged by Emmanuel Levinas on several points. In his essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Levinas invites thinkers to consider the ethical relation to the other to be foundational. 9 Unlike Heidegger Levinas recognizes this otherness as a starting point for morality. The philosopher Edith Wyschogrod says, “It is the Other whose face means “thou shalt not kill” that provides the objective criterion for all moral action.” 10 While this work is not offered as a phenomenological treatise, it does make sense to me that my ethical obligations extend to persons who are like and unlike me.

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The Holocaust as One Way Hatred Grows In his book, Mass Hate, Neil Kressel investigates the personality of perpetrators. In Kressel’s view social forces like authoritarian regimes may create an environment where mass hate can flourish. Authoritarian personalities may arise in these circumstances to commit crimes of initiation, and sympathizers may willingly commit crimes of submission. Kressel is skeptical that programs of education and sensitivity training will reach those who are primed to commit atrocities and mass murder. He supposes the two most effective methods for addressing this moral and social problem are: (1) the prosecution of perpetrators and (2) the promotion of democratic governments where all people have a voice.11 Mass hate is not a social or individual problem that can be ignored since it can fuel mass atrocities and genocides. While I need not agree with Kressel that educational programs aimed at the reform of some personalities are ineffective, I can agree with Kressel that the two steps cited earlier should be high on the list of ways that a society can proactively address the problem of mass hate and the atrocities and genocides it generates. A critic familiar with Kressel’s work may agree that educational programs are largely ineffective. The critic may then ask why I write. What is the point of offering another book that recounts the moral problems of the Holocaust, if the way forward is evident? By calling attention to the stages of genocide I am acknowledging that mass atrocities and genocides do not suddenly happen. Rather there is a process that leads to mass murders. If we can better understand how individuals make choices depending on the stages they are in, then we can better judge the moral weight of those choices. Likewise, we may be able to identify ways that actors could choose otherwise. Seeing the Holocaust and genocides as processes enables one better to avoid the problem of hasty generalizations in response to the question: “Why?” I am sympathetic with the “ordinary men” explanation for why.12 At least one conceivable way to understand the ordinary men explanation for killing in the Holocaust is to see this as an instance where persons are responding to authoritarian commands to act violently toward others. Claudia Card recognizes the importance of the Milgram experiments, and she is supportive of this as a causal explanation for why persons do follow authoritarian commands.13 I would agree with Card that the Milgram experiments identify how persons do respond to authoritarian commands in a laboratory, and I would agree that Christopher Browning has shown

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historically that many individuals under the influence of peer pressure and authoritarianism will act violently toward others. I would not call this a hasty generalization; however, I would suggest that the causes of why persons responded as they did to authoritarian commands in the Holocaust are far more complex. Moreover, I would point out that the ordinariness of the choice to harm or not harm another in no way lessens the gravity of the decision. I have chosen to begin this work by looking at historical instances of ethical decision making in the context of the Holocaust rather than launching into an analytical argument per se. In so doing I am not insensitive to the enormity of the question: “Why?” Questions of the cause or the origin of the Holocaust and genocide are valid questions, but I want to ask a complementary question, “Why not?” I take this to be a prescriptive question rather than a descriptive question. The question of why is historical, and the application of analytical thought to a historical question leads one to search for first causes. However, the question has serious pragmatic implications. The Holocaust was not the last genocide. Genocide could happen again unless certain values are upheld. Or it could happen again unless certain non-sufficient and non-necessary causes are stymied in the process. I assume that the Holocaust is a token of a type of historical phenomena known as genocide. I assume that genocide is a process, and as a process it is composed of stages. I accept Dr. Stanton’s ten stages as the best description of the stages of a genocide. In the Holocaust the stages of genocide act as necessary and non-sufficient causes in the historical process. Since it is a historical process, I draw heavily upon the historical accounts of the Holocaust to make my points. The history of the Holocaust demonstrates how these stages converge with moral values and moral behavior to produce the process that reaches its climax in mass killing and its anticlimax in denial and transitional justice. This convergence can be represented by a Venn diagram with three classes of phenomena—stages of genocide, moral values, and moral behavior. For the identification of a stage of genocide we consult history. For the identification of moral values, we may rely upon descriptive ethics, and for the identification of moral behavior we may rely upon normative ethics. For example, prior to November 1938 Jews experienced discrimination but were not necessarily persecuted. This phase of history represents the discrimination stage of genocide. The discrimination describes a negative valuation of the race that is targeted. The discrimination gives rise to use of denigrating

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language or denial of social privileges that normative ethics would count as blameworthy behaviors. To discuss ethics through the stages of the Holocaust I am obliged to inform the reader of my usage of the terms descriptive and normative ethical discourse. When I have offered a brief discussion of those ideas, I shall examine ethical decision making in the context of the Holocaust. Descriptive ethics and normative ethics I take to be types of ethical discourse to be distinguished from metaethics. I suppose descriptive ethics is discourse that identifies values and actions as right or good. Some action is right, and a contradictory action is wrong. I suppose normative ethics to be discourse that is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. Something ought to be done or not, or some character should be developed or not. In their article, “Virtue Ethics” Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove identify virtue ethics as one of three normative ethical theories.14 The remaining two normative theories I shall refer to are deontological ethics and consequential ethics. Each of the three varieties of ethical discourse offer its theoretical description or prescription for character or action to promote the good. Each of the three varieties of ethical discourse make possible the judgment that some behavior is wrong or blameworthy. Thus, in this work I am taking a multi-valiant approach to normative ethics. Through the work I take the right to life of individual humans to be a fundamental right. This right may be grounded in the metaethical theory of intuitionism. Thus, the right to life may be regarded as self-evident. 15 It is consistent with the three varieties of ethical discourse, namely teleological ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics. I suppose that they each support the notion that the right to life is a basic good. Rule utilitarianism, natural law theory, divine command theory, the Jewish Torah, the Christian Golden Rule, and the Buddhist Silver Rule all recognize an individuals’ right to life, and each condemns wanton murder that is committed in genocides.16 Suppose someone denies the self-evident principle that all persons have a right to life. I suppose they are not affirming the contrary, namely, that no persons have a right to life. That universal negation is a nihilistic proposition. The suppressed premise they affirm is the particular affirmation: Some persons have the right to life. Or they may assert the particular negation as the Nazis did: Some persons have the right to life, and some do not. The implication requires a defense of their existence over and above the existence of others or the environment. In practice those who deny all a right to life too often become the oppressors of those whom they would

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exclude. Why should the oppressors have an exclusive right to life? We shall discuss in Chap. 2 the faulty binary reasoning that racists rely upon to defend their existence to the exclusion of others. Frequently the defense of an exclusive right to life is a thinly veiled claim to power, that is, an appeal to brute force. The oppressors believe they should exist, since they wield the power to exist. How may we understand ethical decision making? I assume that ethical decisions are part of a practical reasoning process that is comprised of background beliefs and leads to practical activity. Polish officers knew what values they deemed reliable and had practical knowledge about their ordinance and about their enemy, the Jews, when they decided to kill Jews. It is no trite matter to say that throughout the stages of genocide actors are called upon to make significant ethical choices shaped by knowledge and societal values associated with those stages. One finds in the writings of Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, and like Existentialists a description of an existential crisis. The choices of a Jew living in Poland or even Berlin before 1939 are not the choices of a Jew who was confined to the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 before the uprising. Each actor faces their own existential crisis. In the moment of crisis, one must choose, and not to choose is likewise a choice. Actors caught in the drama of an unfolding genocide confront the existential choices that each stage presents. During the stage of classification, one must make choices regarding racism. The choices made by oneself and one’s peers at that stage will impact the choices that follow during subsequent stages like the stage of organization. As we recount the unfolding of these stages it will be important to ask repeatedly: What can and what should the actor choose to think, say, or do? Descriptive ethics speak to what actors can think, say, or do; and normative ethics speak to what actors should think, say, or do. Prescriptions of normative ethics promote behaviors that uphold the right and the good. When we approach denial as a comprehensive term reserved for the conclusion of the Holocaust, it lends support to the notion that genocide or the Holocaust is an event rather than a process. I am exposing my bias when I say that genocidal denial is an attempt to falsify an interpretation of an event. The denier says either the event did not happen or the event was not what the person supposed. So, I maintain denial happens not only at a late stage in the process of genocide or the Holocaust but also in earlier stages. Yes, there are some who deny that a genocide or the Holocaust happened. Also, there are persons who deny that the stages of genocide or the Holocaust were happening. We return to the question: Why repeat

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well-worn accounts of genocide or the Holocaust? In repeating these accounts, we expose denial. It is important to expose denial in situ. That can enable us to expose denial among us now. Exposing denial enables us to see if and when the stages of genocide may be erupting in our generation or our community. When a racist joke is accepted as good humor, the joker who regales in the humor has set the standard for what is socially tolerated and approved in his or her circle of influence. The individual proceeds as if the behavior was harmless or good. This is a subtle denial that racial discrimination is happening or that it will lead to anything worse. I am aware some readers may want me to say that genocide is a moral atrocity. This follows from the careful work of Claudia Card. 17 I would agree with Card that genocide cannot be excused by a resort to metaphysical excuses. Perhaps it is conceivable that genocide could be set in a distinct moral class like war. Then philosophers could hold forth on just acts in genocide and unjust acts. I am not so persuaded. I am also aware that other readers may want me to side with the “ordinary men” scholars who want to say that it was ordinary men and women under extraordinary circumstances who were responsible for the wrongdoing of the Holocaust. I am not prepared to say that the Holocaust or other genocides represent collective madness, and I am not prepared to say that the Holocaust or other genocides are a process of population control. These are quick and fast generalizations I do not want to indulge here. What I do want to say is that at every stage of the Holocaust ethical decisions were being made that resulted in an undeniable ethical disaster. To understand that we need to consider the stages of genocide within the Holocaust. Likewise, we need to anticipate how the descriptive and normative dimensions of ethical discourse may apply to the choices actors make in those stages of genocide.

Genocide is a Process The ten stages of genocide identified by Gregory Stanton are posted on the Genocide Watch website. When I refer to discrete stages of genocide, I am using Stanton’s catalog as a reference. Stanton’s stages are: 1 classification; 2 symbolization; 3 discrimination; 4 dehumanization; 5 organization; 6 polarization; 7 preparation; 8 persecution; 9 extermination; and 10 denial. (Stanton http://www.genocidewatch.com/). In her article, “Genocide is a Process, not an Event,” Sheri Rosenberg discusses how treating genocide as an event can be misleading. 18 One

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would be mistaken to believe that the Holocaust is a single event that happens as a response to the “final solution.”19 That would unfairly represent the many persons whose lives were lost as a result of being shot or being worked to death in slave labor camps. In addition, it fails to capture the many contributing causes that are subject to moral judgment. I take Stanton’s list to be representative of the stages of genocide and not exhaustive. The stages can be seen as sequential stages, but I do not see them following one another in invariable, lockstep fashion. The stage of persecution could precede organization, and it could follow dehumanization. Careful readers can find all stages represented in the Holocaust. The Jewish Museum of Milwaukee has a page demonstrating how a reader can find in Rywka Lipszyc’s diary all the ten stages represented. 20 Since I have chosen not to develop a stage-by-stage description of the Holocaust, I shall refer to genocide as a process having two phases: (1) the genocidal priming phase; and (2) the peak genocide phase. This distinction I borrow from the Anthropologist and Genocide Scholar Alexander Hinton.21 I take seriously the notion that Stanton’s stages one to eight are contributing causes to stage nine, when mass killing happens. However, I do not suppose they happen in sequential lockstep. Depending on how one defines stage eight, persecution, one can see it happening as early as stage one. What I take to be an important observation is that the ethical choices happening throughout the two phases of the process are not inevitable choices. Individuals can choose not to stereotype others, and individuals can choose not to dehumanize other persons. Likewise, individuals can refrain from murder. Part I consists of Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—the genocidal priming phase of the Holocaust. This includes Stanton’s stages of the process of genocide that precede the peak phase of mass killing, that is, stage nine, extermination. Prior to the peak phase Stanton’s stage one of classification, stage three of discrimination, and stage four of dehumanization are becoming more widespread. Some murders may be taking place, but those are localized murders rather than mass murders. In genocidal priming victims may be persecuted and some may be murdered, but mass murder has not yet taken place. “Part II—The Peak Phase of Genocide in the Holocaust” examines the ethical choices and actions that bring about the mass killing we associate with the Holocaust. What I identify as the peak phase of genocide is inclusive of all the previous stages of the genocide process as well as Stanton’s ninth stage, the stage of extermination. It represents the stage where

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perpetrators’ hands are bloodied from mass murder. In the peak phase of genocide actors are identified as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders largely on the basis of their role during the mass murders. The mass killing happening in the peak phase cannot occur without the support of some of the preceding stages such as organizing. Denial is discussed only insofar as it constitutes a part of the first nine stages of the Holocaust.22

Notes 1. Peter G.  Baines, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (1963): 130–41. 2. Norman Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002). 3. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012). 4. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 228. 5. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 278. 6. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 225. 7. John Roth, Ethics During and after the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 161. 8. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, 370. 9. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Philosophy Today, 33 (Summer, 1989): 121–29. 10. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 11. Neil Jeffrey Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (First Edition) (New York: Plenum, 2002), 277. 12. For an extended discussion of the “ordinary men” explanation see: Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial 2017). 13. I have assumed readers have some familiarity with the famous Milgram Experiment that aims to inform people of the ability of authority figures to compel persons to obey orders even if they are inclined to do otherwise. Readers unfamiliar with the Milgram Experiment may consult the resource: What was the Milgram Experiment? The experiment is cited as an explanation of why soldiers or police killed Jews in the Holocaust. The philosopher Claudia Card believed that there was a disanalogy between the subjects of the experiment and the perpetrators like Adolf Eichmann. I agree that there is a disanalogy at work, though I may not necessarily see the same disanalogy. See Card’s book, Confronting Evils: Terrorism,

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Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11. I refrain from invoking the Milgram Experiment as the singularity that explains killing in the Holocaust. Why? My own short version of the experiment follows: Psychology professors on a college campus designed a controlled experiment to test the willingness of persons to obey orders to harm others. In the controlled experiment subjects are asked to force upon victims electric shocks that are mild, intense, and so severe they could produce a fatal reaction. In response to the command of authority subjects can or cannot not give victims shocks so severe that they could produce a fatal reaction. Subjects did give persons near fatal shocks. [Note: the delivery of real fatal shocks would not be allowed on any college campus by an IRB board.] Hence, subjects do demonstrate a willingness to follow superior orders to harm others. From this some would like to conclude: All persons under superior authority will harm victims if they are ordered to do so by their superior authority. I reject the Milgram Experiment as a singularity that explains the behavior of perpetrators in the Holocaust. First, I reject the experiment as a disanalogous example. I could be wrong, but I find the artificial environment of a college psychology lab with college co-eds as controlled subjects pressing buttons to be disanalogous to a field of battle where military police or soldiers under commanding officers are told to press triggers to kill Jews. The level of coercion is disanalogous. In the military dissenters may be shot on the spot. Since I could be wrong about the disanalogy, let me concede the point. Let us say that the Milgram Experiment does prove that persons succumb to the suggestions of superiors to inflict harm on others. The subject of persons who succumb is vague and lacks quantification. My second objection is that the claim is non-­ falsifiable. The experiment has the aura of falsifiability, but it leads to a non-falsifiable generalization about the power of authority to control subordinates. The hasty generalization I reject is: All subordinates are subject to the manipulation of their superiors. For the term “superiors” one could substitute any authority figure including metaphysical powers. If the Milgram Experiment is a falsifiable scientific experiment, the hasty generalization is unsound. Likewise, in the context of the Holocaust, if the generalization is fallacious, then some civilian and military subordinates would not succumb to the dictates of the Nazi inner circle whose aim it was to kill all Jews. In fact, some soldiers refused to serve in the killing squads, and some civilians refused to obey the Aryan laws and sheltered Jews at the risk of their own lives. The soldier who loads bullets into the magazine of his or her weapon knows what effect the ordinance will produce upon a human body when fired at the body at close range. They are not pressing buttons to await an uncertain outcome. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017).

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14. Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition). 15. When the right to life is seen as self-evident it is descriptive of a fundamental good. Declarations of this right are seen as descriptive. Thus, the right functions as a description rather than a stipulation within the “Declaration of Human Rights.” 16. For the Declaration of Human Rights see Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights (Berkley, California: Westview Press, 1993). 17. Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. 18. Sheri P.  Rosenberg, “Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 16–23. Following Genocide Watch these stages are presented as ten stages. For an alternate view of the number of stages Mukimbiri, J 2005, “The Seven Stages of the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of International Criminal Justice, 3, (4,2005): 823–836. 19. Sheri P. Rosenburg, “Genocide is a process, Not an Event,” 19. 20. See https://jewishmuseummilwaukee.org/10-­stages-­of-­genocide/. 21. Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 44. 22. Regarding denial and the distinction between hard and soft denial see Deborah Lipstadt, Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005). See also Berel Lang. “Six Questions on (Or About) Holocaust Denial.” History & Theory 49 (2, May 2010): 157–168.

CHAPTER 2

Antisemitism is a Vicious Racism

Introduction It is naïve to say antisemitism explains the Holocaust. The history and the ethical commitments discoverable in the Holocaust are not reducible to a single issue such as antisemitism. Yet, antisemitism precedes the Holocaust, shapes the Holocaust, and outlives the Holocaust. Antisemitism provides a cultural and ethical underlayment for the stages of genocide identifiable in the Holocaust. Thus, we may begin our reflections on ethics through the phases of the Holocaust by examining antisemitism as a vicious racism. To understand antisemitism better, we may analyze it as a racism and a hatred. To say antisemitism is a racism is to distinguish it as a single racism. To say antisemitism is a hatred is to recognize that hate can and does have many targets, and Jews are simply one target of hate. Both relations must be discussed in greater detail. As we begin and continue our investigation of ethics through the Holocaust, we are confronted with the question: Why? That should not be asked without asking the complementary question: Why not? This study will call attention to the necessary and nonsufficient historical causes of the Holocaust. It is not an attempt to offer a single answer to the question of why the Holocaust happened. So, it will not satisfy the researcher who expects to find a defense of a Goldman-like thesis that a society devoted to authoritarianism was the sufficient condition for the Holocaust, nor will it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_2

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satisfy the researcher who is looking for another Browning-like thesis that ordinary individuals responding to peer pressure and to superior orders caused the Holocaust to happen. The ethical issues that arise before, during and after the Holocaust are not new. They are subtle issues, and they must be confronted where they appear in society and practices today. The search for causes is often a search to identify where and how it all began. A pragmatic investigation may ask: Where does it end? I respond that the processes giving rise to genocide have not ended. This chapter on antisemitism, racism, and hate identifies an underlying social and ethical condition that continues to this hour. Speaking metaphorically antisemitism like other racisms is an ember that remains alive in the post-Holocaust era. It can still be fanned into a raging fire. I draw this inference from my understanding of the phenomenon of antisemitism and the judgment that it does represents a vicious racism. Where racism and hate converge, they can become a social norm, and in those cases I would contend that one finds a surrender of rationality and autonomy and a cultivation of vice. I shall maintain that the hatred in vicious racism is an affront to a responsible exercise of autonomy and the cultivation of the virtue of care.

Jews, Christians, and Antisemitism in Supersessionism Antisemitism targets Jews for their ethnic and their religious views. Some scholars have taken pains to distinguish antisemitism from anti-Judaism. The former is seen as an opposition to Jews as an ethnic group, and the latter is seen as an opposition to formal Jewish religion and customs. While Christianity is historically intertwined with Judaism, some of the strongest opposition to Jews has come from Christianity. The doctrine known as supersessionism both explains that opposition and provokes that opposition. Chapters nine, ten, and eleven of Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans discuss the relation of Jews and Gentiles under the new covenant. Like so many sacred texts these writing admit various interpretations. From these chapters one can conclude that the Jews were rejected in favor of Christianity, or one can conclude that the favor of God is something that God never rescinds. In the latter view Jews are still favored by God in the Christian era. This gives rise to two doctrines of supersessionism—an exclusive doctrine that denies Jews access to God and heaven, and an inclusive doctrine that recognizes Jews as God’s chosen people in the Christian era and beyond.

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Scholars of the twenty-first century are recognizing the fact that early Christianity was intimately associated with Judaism in its early years. This intimate relationship that existed for the first two to three centuries was overlooked or suppressed in the intervening centuries. Subsequently there was a growing tension between Judaism and Christianity, and this was evidenced in the doctrine of supersessionism. The claim that Jews were responsible for the murder of Jesus, the founder of the Christian church, has served as the basis for contention between the two groups. The deicide claim, that is, the claim that Jews killed God, gave some Christians cause to harbor a present grudge based on a past unresolved conflict. This is an example of how an ancient animosity can fuel hostilities in a terrorist organization and in a genocide. Supersessionism assumes that God covenants with a people to be God’s chosen people. The notion of an old and new covenant is discussed at length in the chapters in Romans previously mentioned. If a new covenant is established, the old covenant can remain in force, or it can be canceled. Briefly stated, exclusive supersessionism is the notion that a new covenant of God in the Christian church superseded the old Mosaic covenant with the Jewish people. in his article, “On Israel’s God and God’s Israel: Assessing Supersessionism in Paul,” the New Testament scholar Bruce Longernecker discusses the two opposing views of supersessionism.1 In the view of replacement theology, a previously favored people and covenant are replaced by a superior people and covenant.2 In opposition to that view is the view that God’s covenants are irrevocable. It is Longernecker’s conclusion that Paul purposely avoids “any suggestion that God’s covenant with Israel had been abrogated.”3 Supersessionism can be seen as an eschatological doctrine, that is, a doctrine for end times. It identifies the chosen of God who will in the end times enjoy the benefits of the Messianic kingdom either in heaven or on earth. The doctrine foretells the fate of Gentiles and Jews in the age to come. In the replacement theology version of supersessionism only Christians and Jewish converts enjoy the blessings of the age to come. While the doctrine provides an eschatological vision of the fate of Gentiles and Jews, persons persuaded by replacement theology may infer that Jews are subject to the rejection of God in the present age. Two prominent spokespersons in the Christian world who have expressed opposing views of the relation of Jews and Christians are Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, and Pope Paul VI in the twentieth century. Each has thousands of followers who are willing to believe and act

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upon their leader’s understanding of the relation of Jews and Christians. Each offers a view of the relation of Gentiles and Jews that supports one type of supersessionism or another. Their views are illustrative of the way religious leaders have shaped attitudes and behaviors toward Jews. Consider the view of Martin Luther regarding the relation of Jews and the Church. 4 Church historian, Christopher Probst, observes that Martin Luther was speaking into a “highly charged” social climate.5 Simply stated, there was already in Luther’s century a “Jewish Question,” and many contemporaries of Luther were negatively disposed toward Jews and their lifestyle. Luther’s antisemitic writings aimed to discredit the theology of Jews and their lifestyle and echoed the sympathies of many Christians of the preceding century. At the conclusion of Luther’s treatise, “On the Jews and their Lies,” he makes seven recommendations for the treatment of Jews.6 Consider just two recommendations. First, he recommends that the synagogues of the Jews be razed, and second, he recommends that their prayer books, Talmudic writings, and their Bible be confiscated. In the same document Luther says, “These are the people to whom God has never been God but a liar in the person of all the prophets and apostles, no matter how much God had these preach to them. The result is that they cannot be God’s people, no matter how much they teach, clamor, and pray.”7 Luther’s view is consistent with a replacement theology. The second representative view comes from Pope Paul VI. On October 28, 1965, the Vatican issued a document discussing the relation of the Catholic Church to other major religions of the world, Nostra Aetate. Consider item 4 of the document: True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.8

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Nostra Aetate has brought about significant changes in the ways Catholics view and interact with Jews. Some changes include a change in the hermeneutical methods used for interpreting sacred texts, an alliance of the religious people in addressing many social and environmental issues, and an ongoing dialogue about the shared expectation of a messianic visit. In the spirit of cooperation both religions can affirm that antisemitism that approves and encourages harmful action toward Jews must be condemned as morally wrong. Supersessionism is about making or denying room for Jews in the eschatology of the Church. If Jews have a place in God’s eschatological kingdom, then respect of Jews today is warranted. If Jews have no place in God’s kingdom, then for some Christians it remains unclear why they should be treated with respect now. Disrespect of Jews is a practical entailment of some versions of supersessionism, and that disregard is a form of antisemitism.

Antisemitism is a Racism At its core racism makes use of a disjunctive logical proposition: A or B. By substitution the disjunctive particles are me and you or us and them. The binary at work in the proposition juxtaposes self and the other, and the disjuncts can be understood to represent the singularity of individuals or the plurality of ethnic groups. As a disjunction it may be understood as an exclusive disjunction or an inclusive disjunction. The social version of the hard disjunction asserts either us or them but not both. The social version of the soft disjunction asserts either us or them or both. The soft disjunction that can be associated with racism is consistent with a cosmopolitan view of ethnic relations. The soft disjunction of racism I regard as a benign or congenial racism, and I shall not discuss that at length in this chapter.9 Underlying the implicit logic of vicious racism is an attempt at special pleading that aims to make a metaphysical distinction where there is no difference. The distinction effectively dehumanizes the other race. In a public forum this distinction fails to provide a justification for discriminatory treatment of the other. In both the inner dialogue of the vicious racist and in the inter-group dialogue of racists this amounts to a metaphysical excuse. The vicious racist is claiming to be human with the rights and privileges thereunto and denying that status to the others. By declaring the others to belong to a distinct species or no species whatsoever the racist is creating an excuse for their treatment of the others. It is a

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metaphysical excuse that fails in the public domain outside the racist’s circle of communication. I suppose there can be a benign or even a congenial racism that acknowledges ethnic differences between peoples without ill will. If there is a benign racism, the benign racist is not threatened by the other. Some may insist that this benign attitude toward ethnic differences should not be identified as a racism. For the most part racism is of a vicious variety, since it is driven by hate. This is the form of racism that philosopher and ethicist John Roth sees as a driving force behind genocide. In Ethics During and After the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau, Roth has argued that most if not all genocides were provoked by racism, and he says, “racism and genocide enflame each other.” Roth adds, “Racism’s impulses can be muted, but such pressures do not eliminate the “logic” of racism, which entails that a perceived racial threat to one’s own racial group cannot be ignored with impunity.” 10 If there was only vicious racism, then I would fully agree with Roth. If it is conceivable that there is a benign racism, then eliminating racism may not provide a single solution to the elimination of genocide. For some individuals the claim that antisemitism is a racism may be a sufficient reason to condemn antisemitism. What is it that one condemns when one condemns racism? As radical as the notion may seem racism can take many forms. Anthony Flew pointed out that there could be no less than three varieties of racism—unjustified discrimination, heretical belief, and institutionalized racism. 11 He rejects the notion that racism is heretical belief, and I shall not discuss that notion. Vicious racism is an embodiment of hate, and we shall discuss that below. When racism acts as an embodiment of hate, it manifests itself as an intentional disregard of the other. I am not supposing that race is a natural kind. To say that race and racism are artificial constructs of the human imagination is not to report something new. I recognize race as an ethnic distinction that promotes finite social relations that can be reinforced socially and morally. I agree with the judgment that humans are of one natural kind.

The Insidious Side of Institutionalized Racism Anthony Flew objected to the notion that racism could be institutionalized without the intention of some racists. He said, “to speak where intention is absent of either institutionalized racism or institutional violence is a

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perversion.”12 I agree with Flew that one can find the driving force behind most instances of institutionalized racism to be the intentions of racists. However, I suspect there may be two instances when institutional racism is not the product of the intention of racists. If we overlook these instances when racism manifests itself in institutions, we may be overlooking the full extent of its insidiousness. First, institutional racism can take the form of an ideological practice that actors unreflectively act upon. Such ideological practices allow things to get done by convention. Those who engage in these practices do so without question since the practice brings about some desired effects. As Sally Haslanger points out, these practices are socially embedded.13 For a United States driver driving on the right side of the road may be an ideological practice. Compare that with practices of an institution like segregation. I take segregation to be an oppressive institution. In some instances, the practices of segregation may appear as practices of a racial institution that lacked immediate intentional agency. Those who designed segregation policies did intend the policies to be racist, but the policies may have outlived their designers. Some who enforced segregation may have perpetuated the intention of racists of bygone days unreflectively. I suppose the institution to be an illustration of that phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche described as an ancient will to power.14 Members of the present generation may not have intended the practice as a racist practice, but someone in bygone days did so. The oppressive practice outlived those who created it to oppress others. Perhaps Flew would disagree, but if a practice can be racist without any living racists intending it, then the institution may not have needed a racist’s direct intention for its creation. It is conceivable that some racist institutions could have developed in a social environment where individuals were so insensitive to the harm of racism that they failed to recognize the institution as racist. In this view, can we make sense of institutionalized racism? Yes. Racism can be institutionalized in various ways. Racist institutions can develop intentionally or unintentionally. A practice that fosters racial discrimination can be created thoughtlessly, that is, without the direct intention of racists to discriminate against members of a targeted race. Moreover, racist institutions can become self-perpetuating phenomena unless they are checked. Racism can be institutionalized in many ways. Those most evident are practices, policies and procedures, and laws. As a necessary and nonsufficient cause racists can produce practices, policies and procedures, and laws

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that embody the values of racism. Or non-racists can produce the same. What is critical to calling an institution racist is that it embodies the exclusive racist disjunction that will bring about disregard and oppression—you or me, us or them and not both. Some critics suggest that discussions of institutional racism have tended to focus on institutions and to overlook systemic racism. 15 The criticism assumes systemic racism is something beyond institutions. Earlier I stipulated that an institution can be a thing like a school but also a practice, a policy or procedure, or a law. I see racism as being embedded in the institutions, and my reply may be considered Aristotelian in spirit. In Michael K. Brown’s introduction to Whitewashing Racism, he speaks of the racist “institutional structure of health care.”16 From this one supposes the institution of health care is racist. Is there a systemic racism beyond such institutions? No, and yes. If we are speaking of a health care entity as an ostensible business, and we find that it is generating racist disparities, then that health care entity is an institution that is racist. If all health care entities in a society or an association are racist institutions, then it is fair to say health care is a racist institution in that society or association. The same reasoning may be applied to schools and the educational system. A school may be a racist institution or a collection of schools like the American public school system could be a racist institution. A single law within a law code can be a racist law, and an entire law code can be a racist code. The racism is within the institution, and institutions can be understood as individual or collective entities. Hence, we are not overlooking systemic racism when we point out that one health care institution or one public school is a racist institution. If these racists institutions are bound together by a racist system, then the system amounts to the society itself. It is racist. Institutions such as laws are created intentionally. It is possible that their creators were so shortsighted that they did not perceive how an institution would embody the exclusive racist disjunction, but it is not probable. Practices, processes, and policies are not necessarily the product of intentional design. When practices, processes, policies, or laws become institutions through repetition and recognition, they can be racist institutions. For example, Joshua Glasgow refers to a real estate appraisal process as a practice that represents an inequality that is responsive to racism.17 Some have identified this discriminatory practice as that of redlining, where the real estate of an ethnic group is assigned a lower value than that of other ethnic groups. Some racist institutions are created intentionally,

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and others arise through practices that favor one ethnic group rather than another. Anthony Flew argued that institutions cannot be racist, since they cannot intend discrimination as racism does.18 I would reply to this in two ways. Institutions can be collectives, and institutions can be policies, practices, and laws. The former are collectives that have a will. They possess a variety of subjective agency, and they can intend to discriminate. If so, they can be racists. For instance, a school can have an intention to cultivate a racist climate or a cosmopolitan climate. In this sense I reject Flew’s notion that institutions cannot be racists. There is a second sense in which I am using the notion of an institution. That is in the sense of a policy, practice or procedure, or a law. Flew or his supporters might argue that these are symptomatic of racism, but they are not persons that are racist. I recognize that a law is not a person, but a law can be a racist law. The example of the real estate practice of redlining cited above is a racist institution. It may be a practice that originated through the intention of racists, but it could have become a free-standing practice if all its promoters deceased while the practice continued on. Glasgow agrees that such a practice could outlive its source.19 It falls in the broad category of intersubjective phenomena in the sense that it arises in the experience of persons. However, the practice has an objectivity as a law or a policy. It is a thing, and it is racist. Glasgow and Garcia have supposed that some institutions can be free of agency.20 The institution may have been designed intentionally by agents, but the designers may be deceased or may no longer be associated with the institution. The outcome is that the institution is “free-standing” in the sense that it does not represent the intentions of living persons originating the institution with the ill-will of racism. Suppose a racist institution is free of agency or arises unintentionally. This institution can be at variance with the intentions and desires of those whose behavior it governs. For example, the real estate appraiser may want to appraise a given property at face value. The racist institution of redlining may dictate that a property located in a certain zip code should be valued on a sliding scale that places it below the market value in a different zone. A racist institution governing property appraisal can provide an impetus for appraisers to comply with the sliding scale valuation rather than determining the true value of the property in these situations. Not only do racist institutions embody discriminatory values but they also can reinforce those values in ways that become self-authenticating and

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self-perpetuating. Sally Haslanger says, “We learn about race and what different races ‘deserve’ by looking around us.”21 The institution can become self-sustaining through its negative valuations. The institution may outlive its creators and may continue to impact society and the lives of people by reinforcing the prejudicial judgments it makes and the harm it imposes on peoples’ lives. I shall repeat later that an insidious feature of racist institutions is their ability to work tirelessly for injustice. Brown and Rattansi both speak of the cumulative inequities that racist institutions can produce.22 This cumulative effect may be attributed in part to the fact that racist institutions can outlive the racists who created them. In addition, racist institutions can create disparities and injustices that are passed from one generation to another. If a property is subject to race-based devaluation, and if the property is passed along to an heir, the heir will suffer the adverse effect of receiving property that was unjustly appraised. Thus, the heir suffers a cumulative inequity. For racists and non-racists institutional racism poses a problem. For racists institutional racism can act as a weapon that is available upon demand. Yet it is a weapon that they cannot fully control. Like some biological weapons once institutional racism is released it may not be able to be easily controlled or contained. Racists must take responsibility for the unforeseeable harm that institutional racism can produce. For the non-racist institutional racism poses a problem also. Non-racists must actively work to dismantle the practice, policy, or law, if they would avoid complicity in racism. That begins by identifying the institution as a racist institution. Racist institutions in the Holocaust like the Nuremberg laws are more easily identified in retrospect as racist institutions. Those racist institutions that are not intentional products of racists may be more difficult to identify and eliminate, since they may be embedded social practices that have long been unquestioned. To fail to work toward their elimination would constitute a serious omission. Not only would the omission constitute an approbation of the institution, but it would practically align the non-racists with racists in approbation of the harmful effects of the institution. Vicious racism does divide races into us and them. It is self-affirming and other denying, and it heaps negative values upon the other. Racists can exploit racist institutions for their harm producing effects. Racists can also create racists institutions to shape society and the behavior of non-­ racists. Non-racists who allow racist institutions to continue unchecked become complicit in the oppression that the institutions generate.

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Antisemitism as Hate In the world view of the ancient philosopher Empedocles there were two metaphysical forces exerting an influence on all of life—love and hate.23 Love was a unifying force, and hate was a destructive force. At any moment these forces were driving the universe toward a unity or a disunity in a cosmic cycle not unlike Nietzsche’s cycle of eternal recurrence. Hate is a passion that tends toward destruction. The impact of Nietzsche’s world view on the morals of the twentieth century was noted in the introduction. While I have not embraced Nietzsche’s world view, it is important to understand the role of power or domination in his world view. Nietzsche supposes there is a respect of power for the sake of power. This will-to-power has intrinsic and extrinsic value insofar as it elevates the power of the one who exerts it and furthers the ends of those who would exert power over nature and others. Nietzsche says, “what people believe to be good and evil, that betrays to me an ancient will to power.”24 Perhaps compassion has some role to play in a world that values will-to-power, but will-to-power seems more compatible with self-love and hatred of the other. Hate is a passion that forms negative valuations of the objects of hatred. To say one hates Martians and loves Venusians is an empty claim if hate makes no practical difference. Without complementary action hate could be an empty valuation. Hatred is a valuation that shapes attitudes, behaviors, and interaction with others. Hate craves discriminatory action to differentiate it as a passion that effects the world. Antisemitism as a racism embodies a value-based description of the way the world is and a prescription of how life should be. Antisemitism sees the world as comprised of races like Jews and non-Jews, and Jews are valued negatively. The prescriptive force of antisemitism is found in its confirmation of the negative value of Jews and the approbation of behaviors that reinforce that value. Garcia points out that racism is a matter of the heart. It is a contempt or a vicious disregard for the other.25 This seems to be consistent with Jean Paul Sartre’s notion that antisemitism, a racism, is a passion rather than a rational choice. Yet, it is a moral choice for an individual to give sway to the passion of hate. Antisemitism is not an indifference toward the other. Rather it is a disregard that tolerates or promotes oppression of the other. Why hate? In his book, Mass Hate: The global rise of Genocide and Terrorism, Neil Jeffrey Kressel believes the personality of the hater is a

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product of several factors. Among those factors are a person’s willingness to obey orders, a predisposition to brutality or cruelty, and even a willingness to buy into hate driven ideologies. 26 These factors by themselves do not necessarily prompt individuals to act on their hatred, but in combination they create an environment where hate-based action is understood or even accepted as the norm. One who is prone to cruelty may create a hate promoting ideology. The individual susceptible to such ideologies may express approbation of the behavior of a leader prone to cruelty. Having an authoritarian personality does score high on the list of factors in the personality of haters in Kressel’s view. Authoritarian personalities tend to direct their aggression to socially accepted targets and endorse the values of superiors.27 While there are several routes to one’s becoming authoritarian according to Kressel, the outcome is the same. The individual acquires the personality that is prone to obey the guidance of superiors, is demanding of subordinates, and is highly prejudicial.28 Jean Paul Sartre saw antisemitism as a passion that is chosen, and he identified the passion within racism as hatred. If we recognize it as a passion that is chosen, we would be remiss to treat hatred as a metaphysical excuse. In other words, one could not say with justification: “Oh, hatred overwhelmed me, and I could not refrain from hating Jews.” Hatred fails as a metaphysical excuse for an actor’s negative valuations and harmful treatment of another in the twentieth century and in the present century. Sartre said, “It becomes obvious that no external factor can induce antisemitism in the anti-Semite.”29 Above it was suggested that there is an insecurity in racism. The insecurity is that the other poses a practical threat to the racist. The irrationality Sartre recognized in antisemitism may center in the groundlessness of this racial insecurity. Sartre recognizes antisemitism as a passion that embodies a hatred as well as a love. The anti-Semite loves a hate, and that hate is a passion that senses a threat in the other. Like other passions one can throw oneself into the service of hate. Sartre sees this as a choice against reason. So, one can intensely and superbly hate, and that requires practical activity. Sartre says, “Ordinarily one loves the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hatred, we are forced to conclude that it is the emotional state that he loves.”30 Kressel recognizes that the perpetrator of racist or genocidal violence hates the victims. Kressel resists the temptation to identify a single personality like an authoritarian personality as the personality of a potential perpetrator. However, he does distinguish two varieties of perpetrators: (1)

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those who perpetrate crimes of initiation and (2) those who perpetrate crimes of submission.31 I shall refer to these as the initiating perpetrator and the submissive perpetrator. In an authoritarian society the distinction may be more evident than elsewhere. The initiating perpetrator offers a command or takes first steps in actively engaging in violent behavior directed to the victims. The submissive perpetrator may be a subordinate who receives orders to treat victims in a violent manner, and the submissive perpetrator acts upon the command or the lead of the initiating perpetrator. The submissive perpetrator can be as committed to racist ideology as the initiating perpetrator. The original, first-grade antisemite may be driven to this passion by a sense of insecurity. This individual may believe that his or her racial purity is so fragile that another could ruin that purity by social or sexual contact. The second-grade antisemite may follow in this passion by simply surrendering reason to adopt antisemitism in an act of unreflective loyalty. A second-grade antisemite accepts the antisemitism that the original antisemite promotes. There is no exercise of autonomy and reason to question the validity of the assumptions about the other. There is the security that loyalty engenders when the second-grade antisemite accepts without question the values of the original antisemite. The second-grade antisemite is a type of submissive perpetrator. Racism as it has been discussed here is a morally blameworthy behavior that can arise in various times and cultures. It is a focused hatred that frequently wields power to brutalize or eviscerate its victims, and historically Its victims are diverse. The checkerboard history of genocide is marked with many ethnic peoples who have been hated to the point of death. In the Holocaust we encounter a racism that aims to eliminate the chosen victims who are primarily Jews but also include other vulnerable populations like Roma, Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. Was the Holocaust driven by a deeper motivation? At least some scholars like Emil Fackenheim believe that the antisemitism driving the Holocaust had deeper roots. Given the Nazis’ self-justificatory hubris, it is possible that what they hated was a faith that would challenge their absolute superiority. In this view what was hated was the Jewish witness traceable to Abraham and beyond to Adam. Fackenheim said, “The Holocaust is a Jewish catastrophe—but also one for all humanity.”32 The name Adam is translated as a proper name, but it may also be translated as humanity. If I understand correctly Fackenheim’s point, what proved to be catastrophic was the Nazis’ hatred of the Jewish witness to the divine creation of

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humanity. The notion that one is a divinely created being is antithetical to the Nietzschean notion that within a world that is beyond good and evil the human individual can be a manifestation of a will-to-power. In a chapter titled “The Human Image Defiled” David Patterson writes, the calculated defilement of the human image is part of the singularity of the Holocaust, because it is a distinctive part of Nazis’ singular assault on the essence of the Jews and Judaism. What are the Jews, as God’s Chosen, chosen for? They are chosen for the task of attesting to the chosenness of every human being.33

If we suppose that hatred is a passion rather than a reasoned conclusion, in what way is it related to reason? Hatred can deploy reason to find the means to harm the object of hatred. If racist institutions are available, they can be deployed to fulfill racist intentions, and if they are lacking, they can be created. The more widespread a racist ideology is the more easily racists within that society will be able to create and utilize racists institutions. This was demonstrated in the Holocaust when antisemitism was a widespread and intergenerational bias that spanned several preceding centuries. Haslanger wisely cautions that one cannot suppose the identification of racism as an ideology fully explains the problem and the impact of racism. She reasons that would be analogous to explaining atmospheric conditions by pointing to a thermostat.34 Hatred is to be distinguished from moral insensitivity or indifference. Moral Insensitivity toward others can be understood as an attitude or a behavior pattern that is neither positive nor negative toward the welfare of others. Insensitivity can act as a complement to racism. One who is morally insensitive is disengaged from the welfare of the other. One who is morally indifferent may take a cavalier attitude toward the negative fate of others. The morally indifferent may not act viciously toward another. Moral insensitivity or moral indifference could serve the ends of hatred, but hatred would not be satisfied with these moral attitudes and behaviors alone. Hatred does take a positive interest in the welfare of self or one’s ethnic group at the expense of the welfare of others. Hatred has a positive interest in seeing others suffer discrimination, be denied goods, or even suffer harm. Hatred approves of the harm and suffering of others even if it takes no steps to bring that about. If offered the practical opportunity to realize those values, hatred will optimize that opportunity. Hatred will put down the welfare of others. One way to act upon racist hatred is to deny

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the others’ ethical parity.35 For practical purposes this undermines all ethical obligations to the hated others. If the hated are not moral equals, the haters suppose moral obligations are not owed to them.

Conclusion Antisemitism is a vicious racism driven by hatred that targets Jews. Hatred of the Jew is a cherished hatred of the antisemite. The disregard for Jews in antisemitism can be embedded in racist institutions. Racists can share within their own generation the racist institutions that they create, and they can pass on to subsequent generations those institutions. Antisemitism is a hate that has been passed from generation to generation, and antisemitic institutions likewise have been passed from generation to generation. Antisemitism predates the Holocaust by centuries, and it has survived to this hour. Throughout the Holocaust it provided a social environment where hatred of Jews could flourish. An innocent child could ask why Jews were targets of hatred, but adults living in that environment would know the answer. If they had not embraced that hatred, they knew many of their generation had done so. When that antisemitism was allowed to flourish in an authoritarian society in the twentieth century, it provided a major impetus toward the mass killing that was to happen.

Notes 1. Bruce W.  Longernecker, “On Israel’s God and God’s Israel: Assessing Supersessionism in Paul,” The Journal of Theological Studies, 58 (1, 2007): 26–44. 2. Longernecker, “On Israel’s God and God’s Israel: Assessing Supersessionism in Paul,” 35. 3. Longernecker, “On Israel’s God and God’s Israel: Assessing Supersessionism in Paul,” 39. 4. Christopher J.  Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2012). 5. Christopher Probst, Demonizing the Jews, 44. 6. William Russell and Timothy F.  Lull, editors. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings: Third Edition (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1989), 30, 31. 7. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 31. 8. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions Nostra Aetate Proclaimed by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on October 28,

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1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-­ii_decl_19651028_nostra-­aetate_en.htm 9. I have identified some racisms as benign racism. I take this to be the recognition that there are different ethnicities. It is likely Joshua Glasgow would not count the phenomenon I call benign racism as racism. Glasgow maintains that racism is disrespect and is morally wrong. However, he believes there can be a disrespect that is not malicious. I suppose this is an unintentional disrespect. See Joshua Glasgow, “Racism as Disrespect.” Ethics 120 (October 2009):91. 10. Roth, Ethics During and after the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau, 155. 11. Anthony Flew, “Three Concepts of Racism,” International Social Science Review 68 (3,1993): 99. 12. Flew, “Three Concepts of Racism,” 110. 13. Sally Haslanger, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movement,” Res Philosophica 94 (1, 2017), 11. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Your will and your valuations you have placed on the river of becoming; and what the people believe to be good and evil, that betrays to me an ancient will to power.” Portable Nietzsche, 225. 15. Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16. Michael K.  Brown, et  al, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2003),16. 17. Glasgow, “Racism as Disrespect,” 72. 18. Flew, “Three Concepts of Racism,” 99. 19. Glasgow, “Racism as Disrespect,” 76. 20. Glasgow, “Racism as Disrespect,” 76. 21. Haslanger, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movement,” 13. 22. Brown, Whitewashing Race, 22. See also Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction, 108. 23. Empedocles said, “And these (elements) ever cease their continuous exchange, sometimes uniting under the influence of Love, so that all become One, at other times again each moving apart through the hostile force of hate.” See Drew Hyland, The Origins of Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1992), 246. 24. Portable Nietzsche, 225. 25. J. L. A Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27(1, 1996): 9. 26. Kressel, Mass Hate, 215. 27. Kressel, Mass Hate, 225. 28. Kressel, Mass Hate, 239. 29. Walter Kaufmann, editor, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 332.

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30. Kaufmann, Existentialism, 332. 31. Kressel, Mass Hate, 263. 32. Emil L.  Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994, originally published 1982), 101. 33. David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary (Seattle, Washington: Washington University Press, 1999), 211. 34. Haslanger, “Racism, Ideology, and Social Movement,” 14. 35. How the denial of ethical parity creates ethical gray zones shall be discussed in Chap. 10.

CHAPTER 3

Denial of Rights as a Prelude to Entitlement

Introduction Genocide is a denial of a fundamental right and that is the right of an individual to life. As we noted in the introduction, denial of this right is denial of a self-evident principle. While the onset of mass murder may appear to happen swiftly in genocide, several preliminary steps may precede the mass killing. One preliminary step that has historically led to genocide has been the incremental and systemic denial of individual rights to a select group of people in a society. The Nazis campaign to deny the legal rights of Jews and non-Aryans was a prelude to the denial of their right to life. Can a school be a racist institution? Yes. Can a law code be a racist institution? Yes. Schools and organization, and policies, procedures, and laws can be racist institutions. They can embody racist intentions, and as institutions they acquire a sense of objectivity. When a code of law acts as a racist institution, its codification as law gives the institution an additional air of justification. The law is self-contradictory in the sense that it upholds an injustice, but it is on the books. To obey the racist law is to instigate or to perpetuate an injustice. When racist institutions such as laws are in force, one must choose how one will respond. The existential crisis of being under an unjust law demands that one act, and that action brings about moral consequences. Henry David Thoreau said, “Unjust laws exit: shall we content to obey

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them, or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” Thoreau knew that the codification of unjust laws gave them a sense of authority. Thoreau had such a keen sense of justice that he could see in what ways these laws in his generation were unjust. Thoreau recognized that others who obey these laws may have been morally shortsighted or weak willed. He said, “Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.”1 The choices Thoreau enumerates are clear: obey unjust laws without question, obey while intending to change the law, or disobey immediately. Of course, there is a further option, and that is the option of not allowing the laws to be created. Legislators are responsible if they make laws that become racist institutions. Most legislators who write and enact laws for the public are entrusted with their task as thoughtful and moral persons. They are not morally shortsighted. On the one hand, legislators who create racists laws may believe they are acting in harmony with natural law. However, racist institutions are at odds with natural law. On the other hand, if legislators adopt a positivist outlook regarding the creation of law, they may proceed with the assumed best interests of the people in mind. Racist institutions do not uphold the best interests of the people in the broadest sense. Racist institutions are an injustice, and a racist law is an affront to the making of just legislation. The ideals of justice do not necessarily stop legislators from enacting racist laws. Thoreau rightly observed that unjust laws exist, and those often take the form of racist institutions. Once they are enacted by the legislators the public must decide what choices they will make regarding the laws. Will they obey? Or will they disobey now?

Personal Property Laws and Racism The eighth of Commandments of the Jewish Decalogue says, “Thou shalt not steal.” The tenth commandment says, “Thou shalt not covet.” Theft is a violation of the rights of another to possess tangible or intellectual property. The right to possess property may be correlated with the positive duty to respect the property of another. The underlying normative ethical value may be captured in the following statement: All persons have a right to possess personal property. Hence, the universal end of one’s practical reasoning about property rights may be stated as the following normative

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proposition: “I ought to respect the right of others to own property.” While that property may take the form of real estate, tangible goods, or intellectual property; it can also be understood to include the management of one’s body as his or her own property. Since property rights like ownership of real estate or tangible goods are exercised within a society, the covenants of the society may provide base-­ line conditions that affect the ownership of that property. I may own my house and lot in a county of North Carolina, but if I were to fail to pay property taxes on the house and lot, it could be seized by the state. So, I contingently own property within the restrictions and covenants established by the state. Let us say I am a squatter who is looking for a place to establish a temporary residence. To trespass is to disregard the property rights of another. The underlying practical reasoning associated with the ownership of property can be expressed in the following proposition: I ought to respect the right of another to own property given the covenants and restrictions of the state. This lot is the property of another. Therefore, I ought to respect the lot of another and not trespass on this property. Many are the sufficient and non-necessary causes that conjointly contribute to genocide. Three initial stages in Dr. Gregory H. Stanton’s ten stages of genocide are: 1 Classification, 2 Symbolization, 3 Discrimination.2 Denial of individual rights including denial of property rights is evidence that a society has undergone the first three stages of the process. In the Holocaust denial of property rights is an early step on a genuine slippery slope that leads to the disaster of genocide. This targeted denial of human rights can lead to a denial of the right to life. It did so in the Holocaust. How property rights can be defended shall be examined in a later study. Two sufficient and non-necessary causes that contribute to the denial of another’s property rights are scarcity of resources and hatred of the other. The latter cause is better known as racism. Before we examine those causes, we shall look at the different ways that the denial of property rights and personal rights has historically contributed to genocide.

Genocide and Deprivation of Victim’s Rights Denial of property rights can be a sufficient and non-necessary cause of genocide, while genocide is a sufficient cause for the seizure of the property of the victims. Property is available for reclamation when victims are killed. Once the perpetrators have incorporated the property into their

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holdings the outcome is difficult to reverse. In Luke 20: 9—16 Jesus tells the parable of the unjust tenants.3 In the parable the tenants become increasingly aggressive toward the representatives of the owner. Eventually they murder the son of the owner. The text says, He went on to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and went away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him, and threw him out. Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’ “But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So, they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When the people heard this, they said, “May this never be!”

In the parable the wicked tenants seize the vineyard as their own, after they have killed the rightful heir. Genocide most often manifests itself as mass killing. The victims are deprived of their right to life. When genocide is brought about through rape, sterilization, or societal disruption a serious denial of the rights of the victims has occurred. The reclamation and reintegration of goods and services follows, after the victims have suffered irreparable loss such as loss of life. The spoils of genocide are often considerable. Oppressors are free to seize the goods and riches of their victims once they have been killed. Greed and thievery are powerful but not necessarily obvious motivations for genocide. The Nazis demonstrated a vicious greed in the ways they confiscated and reclaimed the property, goods, and wealth of Jews. The Nazis seized valuable artwork of Jews. They evacuated Jews from prime housing to offer the housing to Aryan occupants. In the killing camps they even robbed corpses of gold dental fillings before they cremated the corpses.

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How Individuals Come to Be Bearers of Rights: A General Account Hanna Arendt is recognized as one of the first individuals to discuss a right to have rights in connection with the question of stateless persons. Since Arendt first introduced the notion, it has been cited as a possible defense of rights of persons in sovereign states or persons expelled from sovereign states. While some scholars treat the right to have rights as a derivative of rights within a state, this author sees in that notion a conflation of two problems—the logical presumption of a right to have rights and the historical emergence of a right to have rights in a society. If rights have a logical grounding that precedes their recognition by a sovereign state, then the historic exercise of rights in a sovereign state is an empirical, that is, historical consideration. Logically rights can be grounded in a number of ways. Natural law theory provides a conceptual basis for grounding rights that logically precedes their recognition in a nation state. Universal principles such as dignity likewise provide a basis for grounding rights prior to the state. Are genocidal victims bearers of rights? I would assume: Yes. If so, in what way is their denial of rights tied to their murder? I suppose their rights are a mixture of the rights of international citizens and the rights of nationals. National rights are contingent rights individuals acquire through citizenship or membership in a nation state. National and international rights may be indistinguishable, until the sovereign state determines that it shall revise those rights. That individuals are bearers of rights may be defended in a number of ways. Perhaps one of the simplest ways of establishing individuals as bearers of rights is by an appeal to natural law theory. Here I shall simply assume that natural law theory provides an adequate foundation for the claim that individuals are the bearers of rights including such rights as the right to life and liberty. The right to life for all individuals I take to be a fundamental right. As bearers of rights individuals acquire a virtual portfolio of rights. Some are fundamental rights, others are internationally recognized rights, and individuals may be vested with national rights in virtue of their citizenship. Understandably not all rights are on a par. Furthermore, the

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acquisition of some rights may happen effortlessly, while the acquisition of other rights may require considerable effort. For instance, I may have acquired the right to vote in a public referendum simply by being the child of a legal citizen of the United States, but my neighbor may have to become a naturalized citizen to acquire the right to vote. The same right to vote was denied to a different neighbor when he was sentenced as a felon. My birth was a natural event that allowed me to acquire the right to vote given the conventions of the state. My birth as a human entitled me to acquire the fundamental right to life. Even if I were to claim the right to life as an international right, no conventions of a particular state would then be required to endow me with the right to life. Historically my birth follows the formation of the state, but my right to life logically precedes the formation of the state. How does one acquire a fundamental right or any other rights? One finds moral theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to be at odds in describing the recognition and acquisition of rights. Underlying these views is a quite different conceptual understanding of the genesis of rights relative to entry into a state. Hobbes supposed that individuals existing in a state of nature were free to pursue and defend their own ends. The resultant environment is highly competitive and infrequently at rest. One often cited objection against simple egoism is that it undermines the cooperation of society and is thereby self-defeating. Consider how Hobbes would view life in the “Wild West. “On the open range each man or woman would have the right to bear arms, and their right was a right of power, that is, the ability to exercise brute force. In a Hobbesian view individuals needed to check their guns with the local sheriff, if Dodge City was to be a peaceful city, and the sheriff would be endowed with the power to confiscate arms to keep the peace. Authority was surrendered to one sovereign who would wield the power for the good of all. If this was a complete surrender of one’s rights to the sovereign, then it follows that the subsequent exercise of rights would be at the discretion of the sovereign. In other words, social rights were derivative rights. Hobbes supposed that the formation of a commonwealth, that is, a civil society required a covenant where one says to another that certain rights are ceded for the good of society. He said, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and

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authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a commonwealth in Latin civitas.4

One may suppose that individuals in a state of nature in either a Hobbesian view or a Lockean view of the world are bearers of rights. If so, their rights differ significantly. In Hobbes’ world view there would be little differentiation of the rights of individuals outside society. Hobbes’ world view is consistent with the right to pursue and protect one’s own interests, and for practical purposes that is the right to be an egoist. In Locke’s world view the rights of individuals are differentiated and may include the right to life, the right to own property, the right to free speech, etc. Individuals in Hobbes’ worldview exercising their right of self-interest necessarily come into conflict with the rights of others. Individuals in Locke’s worldview exercising their well-differentiated rights contingently come into conflict with the rights of others. Scarcity of resources could lead to conflict of interests in either view. I surmise that both recognized individuals as having a negative right to life, that is, a right the individuals could defend. Like Hobbes, Locke envisions that individuals’ rights are vulnerable to abuse or loss in a state of nature but may come under the protection of society. In Locke’s view individuals have the right to defend their life and to protect themselves from bodily harm. When an individual suffers bodily harm, Locke says, “every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature.5” In Locke’s view rights are not necessarily surrendered to the state. Society relieves individuals of the necessity of defending their rights by providing them jointly with legislation, judicial proceedings, and lawful execution of appropriate punishments for transgressions. Locke says, Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them, and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another: but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on earth, are still in the state of nature, each being, where there is no other, judge for himself and executioner; which is, as I have before showed it, the perfect state of nature.6

Societal membership can function as a threshold for the surrender of rights, the acquisition of rights, or the defense of rights. Though Hobbes and Locke are at variance on their description of rights individuals have in

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a state of nature, they both recognize the right to life as a natural right. Earlier I made the claim that the right to life could be grounded in intuitionism, and I claimed that normative ethical systems like natural law theory would uphold an individual’s right and condemn wanton murder.7 Hobbes may have supposed that individuals in a state of nature had a single right to pursue and defend self-interest, while Locke may have supposed individuals had a plurality of rights in nature. It is consistent with the view of both Hobbes and Locke that individuals had a plurality of rights within society. Rights theorists generally identify rights as either negative rights or positive rights. Individuals may defend their negative rights, while individuals must lay claim to their positive rights to acquire goods or services. The negative and positive distinction is helpful in identifying rights that call for defense and rights that permit positive action for their securing. I take the right to life to be a fundamental or inalienable right and to be a negative right. In the world view of Hobbes, one sets aside the right of self-interest upon entering society where more rights are to be acquired, and in Locke’s view the loss of any rights one would experience by entering society would be complemented by the acquisition of additional societal rights. Within society rights belong to individuals in a subordinate sense. Societal rights may be rescinded by society. Whether one chooses to frame their normative ethical discourse as a deontological normative ethical theory or a teleological ethical theory, individuals may remain bearers of rights. Rights emerge as fundamental or historical rights. Fundamental rights emerge within the description or narrative of the possessor or bearer of rights. Historical rights emerge temporally and spatially in a social process of acquiring citizenship in the rights-affirming society. When individuals are deprived of their rights, the foundation of those rights may be denied. When individuals’ historical rights are denied, the denier insists that times and circumstances have changed resulting in the restricting, diminishing, or elimination of the historical rights. Alternately, when the bearer of the rights claims their rights as part of their personal narrative, the party denying the rights of that person refuses to recognize the validity of their personal narrative. For practical purposes those who deny a person’s fundamental rights act as if the person was not a bearer of rights, that is, not a person. A further distinction can be made among rights, and that is the distinction of personal rights and impersonal rights. The right to life is a negative right, but it is a personal right. Personal rights are inalienable. Those rights uphold the sanctity of the person. Assuming some rights are inalienable,

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no Hobbesian tollbooth can strip an individual of an inalienable right. In other words, entrance into one society or another cannot deprive the individual of that fundamental right to life. The right to privacy may be a personal right, but it is not an inalienable right. With justification, one may be called on to surrender his or her privacy for the greater good of society. One’s right to life may entail the sanctity of bodily welfare. For that reason, it is vulnerable to a direct assault on the wellbeing of mind and body. Locke held that persons had property rights in a state of nature. The right to own property may be a negative right, and it may be classed as an impersonal or alienable right. One could be deprived of the right to own property without compromising the right to life. Loss of rights can be brought about through racially discriminatory law codes. A racially discriminatory law code is a racial institution. The making of racially discriminatory law creates a racial institution that can perpetuate itself. It can legally deny some persons of their rights including the right to own property, the right to freedom of movement, and the right to work. Discrimination is the third stage of Stanton’s ten stages of genocide. By this stage identification and symbolization are already well entrenched as social values and practices. While I have cautioned that these stages do not happen in a fixed sequential order, one can easily anticipate how the next step will follow. It is the step of dehumanization. As we will see in the Holocaust the identification of Jews as targets of racism and their symbolization was already occurring prior to 1935, when the Nuremberg laws were enacted. Making racially discriminatory laws against Jews was an overt social gesture directed against people already selected as objects of hatred. The discriminatory laws licensed the acts of aggression and hostility that some were prepared to express. By enacting racist laws legislators put forward laws that embody the extant sympathies of the public that had selected the target of hatred. It is conceivable that one could lose their right to own property without compromising their right to life. Richard Branson is the owner of Necker Island. Currently Necker Island is a part of the British Virgin Islands, and occupants of the islands are considered to be British citizens. During a recent hurricane the island was devastated, but Branson suffered little more than a loss of property value. The devastation of his island sanctuary did not compromise his right to life. The state of the British Virgin Islands could countermand Branson’s right to own Necker Island, and he would still retain his right to life. Through bankruptcy, individuals may lose their private property without loss of life or limb. However, in

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genocide the disregard of the right to own property is often a foreshadowing of disregard for individual’s right to life. Societal seizure of property that amounted to theft became a step toward the total denial of rights of Jews in the Holocaust. This became a moral slippery slope that did end in disaster.

A Conceptual Framework for the Expansion and Contraction of Rights The expansion and contraction of individuals’ rights by society is an ongoing process. Some new or more expansive rights may be acquired, and others may be reduced or eliminated within the society. This is part of the ebb and flow of societal life. Most often abuses limiting the number of rights of persons occurs early in the societal process. In other words, some individuals may be denied equal rights when entering the society, and they may have to struggle to acquire equal rights afterward. African Americans were denied the right of suffrage prior to emancipation. After emancipation their right to vote was suppressed by the poll tax, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and other measures. Women were denied the right of suffrage even after emancipation. Is there reason to think that the expansion or contraction of some rights is morally justified while the expansion or contraction of other rights cannot be morally justified? If so, what is the difference? It was observed earlier that rights can be grounded in a number of normative ethical theories. When rights are grounded in deontological ethical theories, rights may be correlated with duties. To say that a right is correlated with a duty is to say that others are duty bound to recognize the right that belongs to the individual. A negative right is one which the bearer is justified in defending. It is the duty of others to respect that negative right rather than disregard the right. For example, if I have a negative right to privacy, then you have a duty to respect my right and not to interfere with my privacy. Not all duties are equal. Kant and others distinguish perfect and imperfect duties. Failure to observe a perfect duty would result in a fundamental, logical contradiction. Suppose truth telling is a perfect duty. Allowing persons to lie would undermine the institution of truth telling. In contrast, failure to observe an imperfect duty could result in a practical contradiction only. The person who neglected bodily exercise in order to develop his talent as a writer would create a practical contradiction for

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himself or herself, since the person would achieve only one end. Neglecting the practice of writing for bodybuilding would simply be another practical contradiction but not a fundamental logical contradiction. If rights are to be correlated with duties, then inalienable rights best correlate with perfect duties. It is contradictory to suppose that an individual can be denied his or her inalienable right. The duty to respect or uphold an inalienable right would be a perfect duty, since its disrespect or disregard would result in a fundamental contradiction such as the denial of a fundamental moral principle. In this view one who proposes to commit suicide denies his or her perfect duty to uphold life and asserts an imperfect duty to end life when it is convenient. The result is a contraction in the duties of the individual. Contingent rights may best be correlated with imperfect duties. I may have a right to privacy, and you may have a right to free speech. Your right to free speech does not warrant your right to be heard. I have an imperfect duty to allow you to express yourself, and you have an imperfect duty not to invade my privacy. You may speak in my presence, but you cannot force me to listen to you. The exercise of contingent rights may or may not create practical contradictions. The resolution of these practical contradictions may not threaten any fundamental moral principle. The expansion or contraction of rights may lead to an abuse of rights. The process of granting and rescinding rights may become the occasion for perpetrators of genocide to enact a program that systematically reduces the rights of some individuals. While some perpetrators of genocide have taken the direct and aggressive approach of denying victims their right to life, other perpetrators have taken a more indirect approach by incrementally eliminating the rights of victims until they were unable to survive. The incremental elimination of human rights that happened in Germany in the years leading up to the Holocaust was a contributing cause to the genocide that followed. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth-­ century Jews in Germany and Europe lived in relative harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors. Although there were antisemitic undercurrents, these did not pose a systemic threat to the Jewish citizens of Germany. That would soon change with the coming of fascism. While the expansion and contraction of rights is not necessarily an abuse of rights it may be the occasion for an abuse of rights. Rights may be abused in several ways. Simply disregarding the rights of another is an abuse of the individual’s rights. Rights may be abused during their contraction when the inability to exercise one’s rights results in a

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life-­threatening situation. Rights may be abused when equitable access to goods or services is denied in a time when there is a scarcity of resources. Rights may be abused when social criteria are altered to change who qualifies as a bearer of rights. Rights may be abused when contingent rights are elevated to the status of fundamental rights resulting in the endangering of the rights of others. Reduction or elimination of an individual’s rights may so impoverish the person that they cannot survive. The right to life is fundamental and inalienable, but its bearers are not invulnerable but mortal. The normal expansion and contraction of rights can cloak a serious danger lurking in an outright denial of the rights of persons. When peoples’ rights are denied, it is supposed that either they never had the rights or that the rights that are denied were contingent rights that have been revoked. In either case, it follows that the people cannot claim their right was violated. A person who had no right to own property could not claim that his or her property was stolen.

Contraction of Rights: The Slippery Slope of Jews’ Loss of Personal Property rights in German The rights of Jews in Germany were systematically reduced during the Holocaust. When one social group loses rights without some accompanying gain, this may become evidence of social oppression. The contraction of rights experienced by Jews in Germany in the early twentieth century proved itself to be a precursor to genocide. It seems incontrovertible that the events of 1938 in Germany marked a notable change in the treatment of Jews and their properties in Germany. Prior to the rise of Hitler to power Jews served as proprietors of businesses, owned real estate, and conducted themselves as members of the state. The social position of Jews was not entirely secure, but they enjoyed many of the same rights that other citizens enjoyed. The night of broken glass otherwise known as Kristallnacht took place on November 9, 1938. On that night glass storefronts for Jewish business were smashed, synagogues were desecrated and set afire, and Jewish persons were subject to hazing and bodily violence. The mass hysteria that seemed to sweep the country represented an outpouring of violence and the disregard of rights of Jews that had been developing for some time. Martin Gilbert writes,

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Kristallnacht was the culmination of more than five years and nine months of systematic discrimination and persecution. From the first days of Hitler’s regime in Germany, anti-Jewish measures followed with disturbing frequency. The half million Jews of Germany, who constituted a mere 0.76 per cent of the country’s population, were singled out by the Nazi propaganda machine as the enemy within, the cause of Germany’s defeat in 1918 and of her subsequent economic difficulties. As a scapegoat, the Jews were vulnerable.8

Throughout this study I refer to the process of genocide. Gregory H. Stanton and Sheri P. Rosenburg have argued that genocide is a process. (Stanton http://www.genocidewatch.com/) I take Stanton’s stage 9, extermination, to refer to full-blown genocide. I take stage 10, denial, to be a post-genocidal step, though denial could be occurring while genocide is happening. To identify it as a process rather than a discrete incident is to recognize that full-blown genocide represents the culmination of several jointly sufficient causes. Stanton and Rosenburg caution that these are not to be seen as a necessary sequence of steps that precede genocide. Consequently, steps 1 to 8 may be seen as a series of jointly sufficient causal conditions for genocide, and these I have called genocidal priming. Denial of the rights of individuals can be an indication that several of the stages of genocide are occurring such as discrimination, dehumanization, and persecution. Extermination is the ultimate dehumanization since it actively denies the victim’s right to life by denying his or her humanity. Before we examine the legislation governing Jews and property rights in Germany after 1935, we may benefit from comparing the rights previously enjoyed by Jews as members of the society. Until 1935 Jews were citizens of German society and they enjoyed equal rights in the society. They paid taxes as the citizens of Germany, they owned property, were proprietors and owners of businesses. They freely moved about within the boundaries of the nation, and they were subject to the laws of the land. Not a few Jews were decorated veterans who had defended their nation’s honor in World War I. In other words, they were good citizens with equal standing in the nation. When the NASDP established itself in German politics, legislation began to be enacted that would reduce the societal rights of Jews. Seeing the legislation in context gives a reader an overview of the steps that became a slippery slope toward the extermination of Jews in Germany and in occupied territories.

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Before 1935 Jews enjoyed the right to serve as military personnel, to vote, and to be business owners who could receive police protection. Before 1935 Jews could intermarry with Aryans and non-Aryans. The “Aryan Paragraph” in the Nuremberg Laws initiated legal and ecclesiastical changes that would deprive Jews of many of their rights and freedoms. The first of the Nuremberg Laws enacted on September 15, 1935, stipulated: “Marriages between Jews and citizens of Germany or similar blood are forbidden.”9 The same decree forbade sexual relations of Jews and Aryans, and it prohibited Jews from employing female Aryans under thirty-five as domestic workers. In the chapter on antisemitism, we discussed racist institutions. The Nuremberg laws favoring Aryans were a racist institution. They formalized the distinction of Aryans and Jews, an us-versus-them distinction. Thus, they reinforced an identification that can count as a fulfillment of Stanton’s stage one, classification. The census mandated by the NASDP would soon formalize the classification of Jews. These laws objectified and licensed the discrimination that can count as a fulfillment of Stanton’s stage three in the stages toward genocide. Until 1938 Jews still exercised the right of free passage in the borders of Germany and outside. The events of November 9 and 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht marked a turning point in the lives of Jews in Germany. Many Christian Germans harbored an ancient animosity toward Jews claiming that Jews killed Jesus. During Kristallnacht the diffuse hatred toward Jews was transformed into a hatred that condoned violence toward the Jews and others as. This violence against Jews was sanctioned by officials during Kristallnacht, and the police refused to halt the destruction of property and the bodily abuse of Jews. In this incident the masses of individuals who were primed to take violent action began to act out their prejudice and hatred. Legislation had laid a groundwork for the reduction of rights of the others. Germans suffering from the lingering effects of the economic depression held to a general belief that the others were responsible for a scarcity of goods. Finally, when an assassination occurred in France it provided a convenient catalyst to ignite the action of the crowd toward those they hated. Already as a prelude to Kristallnacht some decorated veterans of World War I were called into questioning by the German SS. Neither their former citizenship nor their war record placed them in good standing. Instead, they endured harsh and violent treatment. Their rights were

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being denied all the while. In Kristallnacht the distinction of being a military veteran was overlooked for Jews. Before 1939 no cloak of war could disguise the mistreatment of Jews living in Germany. After the invasion of Poland, the entire nation bent to martial law. Curfews, rationing, and accompanying restrictions on business and commerce provided a cloak for the Nazis’ antisemitic agenda. After the occupation of Poland, Jews were forced out of small communities and directed to occupy designated ghettos. In his essay, “Ghetto Formation,” Raul Hilberg identified three steps used by the Nazis to populate ghettos: (1) locate the ghettos within cities; (2) order movement of Jews into ghettos; and (3) seal the communities by walls or guarded entryways.10 Forcing Jews into ghettos meant that they no longer had the freedom to occupy at will real estate they leased or owned. Their right to free movement was denied. Mary Berg was a sixteen-year-old daughter of an American citizen of Jewish descent. In 1940 during the occupation of Poland she accompanied family members in their flight from Lodz to Warsaw. By the sixth month of her confinement to the ghetto Berg called the experience a “living grave.”11 In her entry for November 15, Berg describes the first days in the Warsaw ghetto: Today the Jewish ghetto was officially established. Jews are forbidden to move outside the boundaries formed by certain streets… Work on the walls—which will be three yards high—has already begun. Jewish masons, supervised by Nazi soldiers, are laying bricks upon bricks. Those who do not work fast enough are lashed by the overseers. It makes me think of the Biblical description of our slavery in Egypt.12

Before 1942 Jews who were confined to closed ghettos were able to exist in a survival mode. By August of that year a process of emptying the ghettos was begun to transport Jews to work camps or concentration camps. Others were being killed. In her August 1942 journal entry Berg describes how the doctor and the children of one home were executed. She wrote, Dr. Janust Korczak’s children’s home is empty now. A few days ago we all stood at the window and watched the Germans surround the houses. Rows of children, holding each other by their little hands, began to walk out of the doorway… They went in the direction of Gesia Street, to the cemetery. At

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the cemetery all the children were shot. We were also told by our informants that Dr. Korczak was forced to witness the executions and that he himself was shot afterward.13

Life in the concentration camps affirmed in numerous ways that the right to remain free from bodily harm was denied to Jews. Victims imprisoned there were denied the basic nutrition to survive. Those who survived were forced to preform hard labor. Others were forced to act as human test subjects for medical experimentation. Slippery slope arguments are often found to be fallacious. The underlying idea of the argument is that there are incremental and progressive steps that lead to a disastrous conclusion. The fallacy arises when the linkage between initial actions and a final climactic conclusion is missing. In the fallacy it remains inconclusive that the intervening steps do lead to the disastrous conclusion, or it remains inconclusive that the conclusion is as disastrous as it is supposed. What is shown here is that the Nuremberg laws are laws that derive people like Jews of specific rights. The deprivation of rights is incrementally and progressively increased by both law and practice. The outcome is that these targeted people were deprived of the basic rights required to live. The incremental and progressive steps that led from a denial of some rights for Jews to a denial of the right to life for Jews are woven into the history of the reign of the Nazis. It is no fallacy to say that the legal deprivation of the property rights of Jews was the beginning of a slippery slope that led to a genuine disaster. The Nuremberg laws stipulated that Jews were denied the right to serve in the military or to intermarry with Aryans. Subsequent laws and policies stipulated that Jews were denied the right to own businesses or retain property in Germany. The right to privacy was denied to Jews when they were subjected to a census that would require their registration as Jews.14 Not long thereafter Jews were denied the right to freedom of movement. Jews had no right to intermarry with other Germans, had no right to hold property or conduct business, had no right to privacy, and had no right to freedom of movement. One by one the rights of Jews were denied, and no complementary rights were gained to justify the loss. In combination these denials of rights would so shrink the rights of Jews that they had no right to life. Mary Berg’s description of the march of Jewish children from the ghetto to the cemetery where they were shot identifies a disastrous conclusion to the slippery slope of the denial of rights of Jews.

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Ghettos and the Right to Personal Liberty It may be within their power for states to refuse individuals the right to enter and travel within their borders. The nation also may be able to impose limits upon the travel of individuals who reside within their borders such as curfews. However, those limitations are not absolute. To confine persons to a precinct or territory and thereby deny those individuals the right of free passage is coercive. It is to place the persons under a type of house arrest while denying them the right of free passage. It is to shackle the individuals and deny them a bodily freedom. When this is accomplished through a curfew the right of free passage is exchanged for the good of social stability or health or some other social benefit. To the onlooker the confinement of Jews to ghettos served no positive social end that would promote general welfare. It served the ends of some citizens only, the ends of the Nazis. Rights of Jews during the Holocaust were lost incrementally by careful design. There are several ways to account for this. In part, this represented a general uncertainty about the preferred means of removing Jews from Germany and its acquired territories. Expulsion or deportation to foreign soil could have served the purpose of the perpetrators of eradicating Jews from their territory. Temporarily Jews were expelled to foreign nations providing that they would not relocate to a German occupied territory. Also, for some time Jews were allowed to be deported to Madagascar or the Middle East. Eventually those alternatives did not sweep Jews from German territories as completely or as swiftly as the Nazis desired. Thus, those who crafted the final solution used a gradual reduction of rights to eradicate Jews. They would place Jews in working and living conditions that would bring about their death. This gradual attrition would appear to be more palatable to the public, and it could be more easily be concealed from international investigation. In the Holocaust dehumanization followed discrimination and preceded full-blown genocide. By the gradual denial of rights perpetrators managed to disguise their final agenda. Likewise in Rwanda or Cambodia the perpetrators resorted to pretenses and deception to prevent early detection of their outright denial of individuals rights. In Cambodia, individuals were snatched from their homes to be placed on a veritable death row awaiting execution. In Rwanda victims were herded into gathering spots they considered to be safe havens such as churches only to be slaughtered in mass.

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Denial of Rights and Statelessness In the Holocaust we observe the incremental denial of rights. In the Cambodian genocide we see an outright denial of rights. When rights are denied incrementally or outright, the persons suffering a denial of rights may lose their status as members of the state. Unless they hold dual citizenship like Mary Berg, they can become stateless. These individuals become refugees without a country. Some states may recognize their fundamental rights, and others may deny those rights. Lacking citizenship in a state may result in the denial of all rights unless rights are grounded in another source such as natural law or a universal principle. Practically speaking Nazi Germany was declaring Jews to be stateless persons without rights. It was their contention that Jews had no rights. Since Mary Berg could claim dual citizenship thanks to her American mother, she was transported out of the Warsaw ghetto to a safe destination in France. Occupants of Warsaw without the benefit of dual citizenship had to endure the brutality of the ghetto or face the likelihood of death in a killing camp. Persons declared to be stateless find themselves in a vulnerable position. They may be expelled from the country that refused them citizenship, and they may be refused either permanent or temporary entry into another state. This represents a double denial of rights. On the one hand, it represents state-based denial of rights that deprives the individuals of the protections of the state. They are exposed and vulnerable without the ability to turn to the state for justice. On the other hand, it acts as a disclaimer of the rights of the person in the international community. It signals that the host country refuses to recognize their rights and others should follow suit. The unstated argument is that we, the host state, do not recognize the rights of the stateless persons, and you, members of the international community, should not recognize their rights. If the will of the German state was adopted by the international community, then Jews would have no state where they might have fled and no remaining rights. The refugee camps that spring up on borders of modern states today are a witness to this process of displacement of people. By an operation of the state that initiates and enforces an expulsion, the victims can become a people that no state welcomes or defends. We will discuss the role of bystander states in a subsequent chapter. It is important to note here that states that displace persons create a moral liability for border states and the international community. Border states must determine whether they will join perpetrators in disavowing the

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citizenship of the displaced persons or if they will uphold it. The larger international community must determine if they will acknowledge the injustice of the displacement. If they acknowledge the injustice of the displacement of these persons, then they must also determine if they have the capacity to offer aid or refuge to the displaced person.

Conclusion The contraction of rights without corresponding expansion of benefits may be analyzed in terms of commissions of harmful actions and omissions of beneficial actions. Depriving another of his or her property rights is an act of commission. From the time that the Nuremberg Laws were enacted until Kristallnacht the negative rights of Jews and others were being denied within Germany and its territories. These legal and social measures were commissions of harmful acts. Refusal to recognize another’s positive rights to lay claim to goods and services is an act of omission. Were complementary acts of omission carried out to deprive Jews of their ability to survive? Historians and ethicists can defend the notion that Jews and others were denied their negative rights. At first glance it may appear that the denial of Jews’ positive rights is not defensible. Critics of liberty and welfare rights like Onora O’Neal point out that the theory of positive rights suffers from explanatory failure when it cannot say why the rights of anyone should or should not be recognized. In a time of scarcity, the rights of non-Jewish Germans to lay claim to goods and services was unquestioned. Once Jews were walled within a ghetto, they were unable to acquire adequate food except through the black market. If they were allowed to work outside the ghetto, their wages would be denied to them. If there were public stores of food and relief funds, the non-Jewish German could collect these goods and relief funds. Access to these food stores and basic civil services was denied to Jews along with the opportunity to work. Jews could not assert, “I have a right to collect food from the public food bank.” Neither could Jews assert, “I have a right to work to earn a living wage.” The denial of these positive rights was a contributing cause in the demoralization and starvation of Jews in and around the ghettos. Both alienable rights and inalienable rights are included in the bundle of rights an individual may possess. Those rights that are general or alienable may be restricted or denied for just cause. For some alienable rights the state becomes the guarantor of the rights. Some ethical reasons can be offered in defense of denying those rights that are alienable. No ethical

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reason can be offered to deny an individual an inalienable right. During the persecution and extermination stages of genocide victims are denied their right to life. This could happen when individuals are deprived of the goods or services required to survive. Killing by a gunshot, strangulation, or affixation is a violent, active denial of another individual’s right to life. That results in a speedy death. Denial of access to basic life needs of food, water, and rest can bring about a slow death. In crafting the Final Solution Nazi leaders anticipated that by design the regimen of forced labor and starvation in their work camps would eliminate many more victims by a process of slow death. Denial of peoples’ rights can be a harm that appears to have no immediate connection to an atrocity like the Holocaust. The Holocaust demonstrates how denial of rights is a subtle harm that can lead to a denial of peoples’ right to life. In the twenty-first century we have not outgrown or overcome this diabolical harm. African Americans today know that the right to vote was not granted to their ancestors when they were introduced as slaves into the United States. Their right to vote was a hard-won right. Yet, that right has remained in jeopardy to this hour due to voter suppression legislation. Likewise gerrymandering has created a serious threat to the ability of some to have their vote count. When rights are being denied to peoples, it behooves the moral community to investigate in what ways this denial of rights diminishes the peoples’ quality of life or could lead to more serious violations of their rights. To deny an individual his or her right to life is a grave moral offense, since the right to life is an inalienable right that calls for respect. Denying the life of another is a failure of a perfect duty and it runs contrary to basic moral principles. For practical purposes the denial of some contingent rights may be as deadly as the denial of a right to life. As the denial of rights expands, the remaining pool of rights of a people shrinks until the only remaining right is the right to life. Finally, the remaining dignity of the people is ignored, and their right to life is denied them. This creates a veritable slippery slope, and the incremental and progressive denial of rights is the intervening step leading to that disastrous conclusion. The outcome of the denial of some non-fundamental rights may be practically indistinguishable from the denial of the right to life. If you can take a people’s lands, then you can take a people’s possessions; if you can take a people’s possessions, then you can take a people’s freedoms; and if you can take a people’s freedoms, then you have primed the way to taking a people’s lives.

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Notes 1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1970), 287. 2. See Dr. Gregory H.  Stanton’s ten stages of genocide at https://www. genocidewatch.com/tenstages 3. The Holy Bible. 4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 132. 5. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 6. 6. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 52. 7. See the discussion of the fundamental right to life in the introduction to this work. 8. Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 119. 9. Simone Gigliotti and Berel Lang. The Holocaust: A Reader (Malden, Maryland: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 82. 10. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 199), 132. 11. Mary Berg, et al. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary. Edited by Sh. L Shnayderman (New York: L.B. Fischer, 1945), 64. 12. Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, 38. 13. Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, 174. 14. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). Critical to the successful classification of Jews was the use of the IBM punch card system. Without this technology the Nazis would have lacked the means of quickly and precisely cataloging Jews. Once cataloged they could easily then be rounded up and sent to ghettos or concentration camps. See the later discussion corporate complicity in Chap. 11.

CHAPTER 4

Propaganda for Genocide

Introduction Propaganda is a powerful tool for persuading a mass of persons. It has been used successfully to communicate information and attitudes that administrators deem acceptable for public consumption. It has been used to endorse consumerism and commercial products. It has also been used to propagate and inculcate hatred toward some ethnic groups. The Nazi propagandists including Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used propaganda to promote an Aryan racism that required for its perpetuation the subjugation or elimination of other races like Jews. Propaganda is a variety of communication that gives matters of fact and value to an individual. The medium of choice for this communication can vary widely but the propagandist communicates to an audience of consumers. There is an implicit level of trust between the consumer and the propagandist behind the commercial jingle, the billboard, or the newsletter. In believing or acting upon the facts and values that are shared the consumer may forego the hard epistemic work of experientially confirming what has been communicated. For instance, I have neither time nor patience to confirm that the best tire pressure for my vehicle’s tires is 37 pounds. I take the word of an expert. Receiving propaganda amounts to a surrender of some of one’s autonomy. The propagandist willingly manipulates and controls the freedom of the other. Whether the propagandist

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communicates accurate facts and reliable values is to be determined, but those who receive their communication place trust in the propagandists. In so doing they surrender some of their autonomy to the propagandists. Stanton’s second stage of genocide is classification. If the first stage of identification distinguishes us from them, then the second stage of classification places values upon us and them. In its simplest form classification in the stages of genocide says we are good, and they are bad, immoral, or evil. Propaganda understood phenomenologically is an objective product that aims to communicate both fact and value. It is the production of propagandists created for consumption with the values of the propagandists embedded in the product. The propagandists consume their own propaganda as an affirmation of the values that they espouse, and they ask others to surrender their autonomy and embrace the propagandists’ values. When the consumer audience accepts the propaganda, they grant to the propagandist a license to test, weigh, and arrive at the values latent in the propaganda. By consuming those values, the consumer audience recognizes the value judgements of the propagandists to be authoritative. Those values are the outcome of identification and stereotyping in varying fields such as consumerism or art. When identification and stereotyping are applied toward ethnic groups, they can create a racist propaganda that is a pro-genocidal. When propaganda influences one to consume one brand of margarine rather than another, the consequences may seem insignificant. When propaganda influences an individual to justify hatred and violence toward another person, the consequences can be devastating. As I initially wrote these lines persons who participated in the January 6, 2021, siege on the United States Capitol were undergoing criminal prosecution. Daniel Rodriguez was one of rioters who believed the propaganda associated with the former President Trump. He believed he was answering a presidential call to save the nation. Rodriguez has been tried for allegedly tazing Michael Fanone multiple times. In an interview with Rodriguez, he reported that he thought he was being “the good guy.”1 Fanone survived the multiple tazings by Rodriguez. Six million Jews who became targets of Nazi hatred did not survive. The ninth commandment in the Jewish Decalogue is a prohibition against the bearing of false witness. Exodus 20:16 says, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” While this command is taken to connote a prohibition on falsehoods, deception and lying in general, its

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focus is narrower. Perhaps it can be expressed in the following statement: All persons have the right to have their reputation represented truthfully. Its logical obverse is the statement: No persons have the right to falsely represent the reputation of another. Bearing false witness is an act that carries negative consequences for the subject. Lying about a person or a group of people can have grave consequences for those who are the subject of the lie. In this study we shall consider the lies about Jews and non-­ Aryans that formed the core of Nazi propaganda. Propaganda is not lethal, or is it? The medium of propaganda is constantly evolving. In the twenty-first century, social media has provided new means of disseminating propaganda. Propaganda is communication that has an objective component and is value laden. The objective component may take the form of facts and figures, but it frequently includes symbols that invite interpretation. When some individuals look for positive endorsements of their behavior, they may turn to propaganda for those endorsements. When other individuals totter on the threshold of indecision about their best course of action to resolve a practical or moral dilemma, propaganda may push them over the threshold. Propaganda provides a ready source of answers for how one should think or behave. It can alleviate the work of reflection and critical thinking. Here we cannot explore fully the role of propaganda in moral psychology. Nonetheless, this chapter does explore the subtle causal links between propaganda and genocidal killing. Readers of Plato are familiar with his well-known parable of the cave as a “parable of education and ignorance.”2 The prisoners in the cave are so constrained that they cannot acquire knowledge of their world. They see only shadows upon the wall of the cave. Behind the prisoners, there is a fire that projects its light onto the wall of the cave. Shadows of objects appear on the cave wall that are produced by bearers walking behind a low barrier carrying uplifted objects and by a fire within the cave. The fire behind the bearers casts shadows upon the wall of the cave. The low wall barrier ensures that the bearers’ shadows do not appear on the wall. The prisoners see on the cave wall the shadows of objects the bearers carry, and they draw various conclusions about objects they suppose the shadows represent. If they hear the bearers speak a name, the prisoners associate the name with the shadow. In Plato’s version of the parable the escapee happily arrives at the truth by progressing outside the cave into the sunlight. The escapee is freed of the notions associated with the shadows, and the escapee comes into the presence of real objects.

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This parable may serve as an analogy that represents the epistemic predicament of individuals who rely upon propaganda to make judgment in a time of genocide. We will not suppose their predicament meets with Plato’s happy ending. The prisoners shall represent the recipients of propaganda. They are the audience for the propaganda. The bearers of objects shall represent the propagandists. The shadows and the names given them shall represent the propaganda, that is, the story told about the shadows. Like most analogies the parable gives rise to a number of disanalogies. In the parable the prisoners are immobile and cannot escape without intervention. As a result, their line of vision is hopelessly limited. Perhaps some members of the audience could penetrate the mysteries and deceptions of propaganda if they exercised their will and reason fully. Likewise, in the parable those who bear objects above the wall may have acted with no ulterior motive. They may have been indifferent to the conclusions that the prisoners would draw about the shadows. In contrast, propagandists are strongly motivated to convince their audience to embrace the same beliefs as the propagandists and to confirm their audience in the propagandists’ prejudices. Those casting shadows in the analogy I have compared to propagandists. Through sight and sound they give the prisoners something to believe. Joseph Goebbels thought that one settled ideological disputes not by an appeal to fact but by an appeal to belief, and propaganda offered individuals something to believe.3 The belief that is formed is based in part on fact and in part upon the intentions and values of the propagandists. In his book, How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley aims to dissuade us that propaganda is merely an appeal to emotions. He concedes that emotions can be grounded in good reason. However, Stanley suggests that propaganda interferes with the process of informing those emotions. From a pragmatic view propaganda brings about a cessation of thought. One seizes upon the emotionally driven conclusions of propaganda and can then proceed to act without further thought. If Stanley is correct, then propagandists can achieve their intended objective when they offer confirmation of the latent values of the audience, when they put a hasty end to questioning of certain values, or when they create a sense of ownership of values touted by the propagandists. Stanley says, Propaganda is not simply closing off rational debate by appeal to emotion; often, emotions are rational and track reasons. It rather involves closing off debate by “emotions detached from their ideas.”… Propaganda is manipu-

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lation of the rational will to close off debate. This is what I will call the classical sense of propaganda.4

I see propaganda as a means for propagandists to communicate their values, that is, their biases. Those who do see propaganda primarily as an appeal to the emotions of an audience may fail to see its link to harmful action. In its negative forms propaganda can be a vehicle to communicate biases of hate. I assume that the harm of hate speech is evident. On the one hand, the propaganda of hate speech asks the consumer to internalize the value of hate. On the other hand, I would suggest that the propaganda of hate speech can function as a segue to harmful action. In other words, propaganda may be both descriptive and prescriptive. Propaganda is intentionally evocative. The nominal form of propaganda refers to communications that are objective, quantitative, and qualitative. The value of propaganda is determined by its connotative force. Propaganda may score low on the scale of accuracy, but it scores high on the scale of evocation. Propagandists exist in a symbiotic relationship with members of a society. They provide a product, propaganda, that is consumed by those persons. Consumption of propaganda allows propagandists to control and influence these persons. Propaganda is a powerful force for the shaping of the social and moral imagination. While there is no fictive “man-on-the-­ streets,” the opinion of this fictive character is able to shape public opinion. This is evident in the culture of consumerism. If the man-on-the-street approves of one product, then that product is worthy of consumption and comparable products are ranked relative to its approbation. If the fictive homemaker approves of a cleaning product, then cleaning products of competing corporations appears as an inferior copy of the approved product. The propagandist can manipulate quantities and qualities while preying on unfounded fears and ambitions to achieve the desired end of persuading the masses to believe one fiction rather than another. When members of the public relinquish their ability to reason and to choose in favor of buying the myths that the propagandists create, they become dependent upon the propagandists for the myths that will shape their habits of consumption and life. Those who are too insecure to think for themselves enslave themselves to the propagandists. Propagandists generate propaganda and they propagandize. The verbal form of propaganda, that is, to propagandize refers to the acts or the omissions associated with the communication of propaganda. In their efforts to

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propagandize the propagandists may define and control primary channels of communication. This censorship is for the purpose of controlling or eliminating competing channels of communication. In the case of audio channels of communication propagandists may block audio communications from sources that do not meet with their approval. Working within the approved channels of communication propagandists may censor unfavorable or contradictory reports that would reduce the value of their propaganda. Unfavorable statistics may be suppressed lest they raise questions about the veracity of dominate propaganda. Propagandists may also aim to circumscribe the information that is shared at large. This control may extend outside a national audience and can become a matter of foreign communications. Modern consumers of mass media news are aware that they hear only part of the truth. Yet, they may be content to receive partial truths. The psychological effect of propaganda is not unlike that of memes. In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggests memes are to the mind like genes are to the body.5 His examples of memes are tunes, ideas, or fashions. He suggests memes can parasitize one’s brain. If we assume that memes are a form of propaganda, then it enables us to understand how propaganda comes to be accepted. Repeated reinforcement of a tune or a slogan is the objective means of spreading propaganda, but the repetition in the mind leads to it subjective acceptance. Dawkins says, “If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spread from brain to brain, and it can perpetuate itself socially by its repetition.6 In his book, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, Jason J. Campbell distinguishes genocidal orchestrators as a variety of genocidal perpetrators. He supposes these genocidal orchestrators driven by genocidal intent to destroy victims engineer the processes that culminate in mass murder, though they may remain behind the scenes. They do so in a way that places blame on the victims. Campbell says, “Genocidal orchestrators reinterpret the act as a non-genocidal event by attempting to justify the use of lethal force. This justification situates the blame on members of the targeted group.”7 Propagandists of genocide do seek to communicate to the general population that victims are responsible for the violence that they suffer. How propagandists stake their claim on the release of information is illustrated in Goebbels’ management of the statistics of fatalities on the

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Russian front. To the extent that it was possible, news from outside sources about the number of fatalities on the Russian front was blocked. Then statistics about fatalities on the Russian front were both underreported, or they were reported with the aim of provoking further hostilities toward the Russians. By controlling the release of information, the German people were led to believe fewer casualties were occurring than was the case. At least one of the aims of propaganda is to shape or alter the basic beliefs of individuals that enter into the practical syllogisms that drives their decisions and actions. If the propagandist can change the assumptions of the actor about who deserves to be told the truth or what constitutes the truth, then the outcome that follows should change. In The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport identifies five types of rejective behavior: “1. Antilocution; 2. Avoidance; 3. Discrimination; 4. Physical Attack; 5. Extermination” (49).8 Allport sees antilocution as an act. Antilocutions are simply negative pronouncements. Prejudicial statements are not empty statements since they personalize and concretize biases. Varying forms of hate speech count as antilocutions. They are speech acts against members of the out-group. We can easily identify the speech and communications of some propagandists as antilocutions. Was it something more? Hate speech can reinforce values, but it can also lead to the questioning of behavior toward the hated. In Stanton’s ten stages of genocide antilocutions happens in the early stages of (1) Classification, and (2) Symbolization.9 Negative propaganda that targets a select population can count as genocidal priming. Moral theorists understand that the threshold between descriptive claims and prescriptive claims may be razor thin. One may say truth is good to tell, and the truth should be told. Within the folds of propagandistic communications prescriptions are easily embedded that call for action on the basis of value claims. Those taught to hate ask, “What’s next?” I have supposed that antilocutions not only classify the target population as enemies but also promote a tolerance for violence toward the target population. Persons who express intolerance for violence may have their veracity or loyalty questioned. In Allport’s index of prejudicial behavior the four remaining types of rejective behavior are incrementally more violent. The violence of extermination is homicidal violence. When it is applied to a social or racial group of persons it can become genocidal violence. Genuine free speech is not intended to serve an agenda for violence. Hate speech can become a contributing cause on a slippery slope to genocidal action.

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The questions we shall investigate in this chapter shall be related to Plato’s parable. Who were the propagandists? What form did the propaganda take and why was it so effective? Who were the recipients of the propaganda? What deep motivations drove the propagandists to share their propaganda? What was the ostensible message that the propagandists shared? To what prejudices and inclinations were the propagandists appealing? In what ways could individuals defend themselves against the propaganda? Finally, how did propaganda anticipate the division of the population into perpetrators, victims, and bystanders? In the parable, one privileged prisoner has the opportunity and know-­ how to overcome the shadows of propaganda, and that prisoner succeeds in attaining true knowledge. For the most part individuals lack the opportunity, know-how, or commitment to discover the truth. Philosophers may chide the average individual with epistemic laziness, but for the most part we, the general public, fall into this pattern of reliance on the path of least resistance for belief formation. In their book, Image Makers, Robert Jackall and Janice Hirota make the point that propagandists fill an important niche in modern society when they make symbolic associations and interpretations for public consumption.10 In their view propagandists are “highly specialized practitioners whose stock-in-trade is the creation, manipulation, and discernment of images and symbols.”11 Propagandists alleviate the hard work for the masses of attaining true knowledge. They do the work of making value judgments about the merit of information shared. Thus, individuals in the masses have an answer for the best product to buy or the right news story to believe, providing those individuals are willing to “take their word for it.” Jackall and Hirota say, The logic of mass media requires arcane knowledge to be simplified and the messy ambiguity of human experience to be constructed into clear narratives, into little stories, focused preferably on some individual who can be celebrated or demonized, with whom mass audiences can identify or despise, or distilled into visual images whose inviting ambiguity allows multiple and varying emotional responses.12

Who Were the Propagandists? Once the Nazis were securely ensconced in society, they made a coordinated effort to reach the German people with their call for loyalty to the Fatherland and to Hitler. In Hitler’s National Community, Lisa Pine says,

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“The process of Gleichschaltung (streamlining or ‘co-ordination’) was designed to bring all aspects of German life under National Socialist control to homogenize German society.”13 The propagandists wanted all the public to believe one story about Germany and the value of its heritage. From the period of genocidal priming until the time of a full-blown genocide there may be a number of personalities that dominate communications as propagandists. Other persons may have acted as minor carriers of the messages of the dominant propagandists. A radio broadcaster may have acted as a propagandist to spread his or her message to listeners, while the producer of the broadcast may have aided and abetted the dissemination of propaganda. Given the Nazis’ attempts to monitor all forms of communication and to censor those that were a perceived threat, propaganda in Germany was homogenized. The informing and persuading of the audience may have been the direct intention of the broadcaster, while the producer may have only obliquely intended that end. Was the producer a perpetrator or a bystander? We may return to that question of who counts as a bystander later. Hitler was both a connoisseur of propaganda, and he was an extreme propagandist. In Hitler’s work, Mein Kampf, he speaks of Jews as the wirepullers who were manipulating society and economics behind the scenes. In retrospect one can see the irony of that claim. Jews comprised less than one percent of the general population in Germany, and they had no monopoly on positions of power. Jews had little influence on the structure of society or the economy. However, there were some individuals in the Nazi inner circle who might rightly be called the “wirepullers” or string pullers. Hitler tops that list. In addition to Hitler individuals whom we shall consider as propagandists are Gerhard Kittle, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and Heinrich Himmler. Two operated within the Nazi high-command alongside Hitler—Goebbels and Himmler. Who believed the high-profile propagandists? Historically the majority of Germans were willing to believe their propaganda and to allow their moral imagination to be shaped by these propagandists. Their willful credulity poses an existential question for today’s reader: Whose propaganda does the public accept, and whose propaganda am I willing to accept? In what ways do today’s propagandists shape my moral imagination?

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Hitler as a Propagandist As the leader of the totalitarian state Hitler positioned himself to be spokesperson for Germany. Scholars investigating the orders of Hitler have found that he was careful not to implicate himself directly in the violence against Jews. Hitler proclaimed himself to be a prophet, and one finds in his early writings the seeds of discrimination and violence toward Jews and the disabled. He invited his readers to join him in hating Jews. By the time World War II was well underway he recalled a prophesy he had made about the Jews—if there was a world war, the Jews were to be blamed, and they should be annihilated. It was not Hitler himself but his military commanders who were the creators of “the final solution.” Yet, the creators of the final solution knew that it was consistent with the will and desires of their leader. Countless bystanders in the general population offered no humanitarian resistance to the implementation of the plan to annihilate Jews. Within Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, one finds the basic arguments that portray Jews as enemies of the state. Hitler relied upon scientific racism to defend his exultation of the Aryan race. To reach its potential the Aryan race needed to remain pure, that is, they could not intermarry with members of other races, nor could they birth biracial offspring. Jews were seen as a dominant threat to the purity of the Aryan race. Since it was supposed that the disabled would pass along to their offspring their disabilities, they too were seen as a threat to the state. Thus, Jews along with the disabled became a problem, an internal enemy of a race-based state. Hitler said, “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”14 Not only were Jews identified as internal enemies of the state, but they were said to control world forces that could negatively impact the state. Hitler was a skilled communicator, and he knew how to mobilize the emotions of his people by an appeal to ancient animosities. Germany did suffer from unemployment, food shortages, and disarmament in the depression era that followed World War I.  Rather than recognizing the failures of Germany’s past, Hitler chose to identify for the masses an international public enemy—the Jews. If international monetary policies were unfavorable to Germany, Jews caused it. If food and energy supplies were insufficient to meet the needs of the German people, Jews caused it. If Germany

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was denied the ability to arm itself for national self-defense as a condition of it surrender after the first world war, the Jews caused it. The subtlety of the communications masked the logical fallacy of the false cause, namely that Jews were the cause of any and all national suffering. Hitler wrote, the Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany. Wherever in the world we read of attacks against Germany, Jews are their fabricators, just as in peacetime and during the War the press of the Jewish stock exchange and the Marxists systematically stirred up hatred against Germany until state after state abandoned neutrality and, renouncing the true interests of the people entered the service of the World War coalition.15

How Jews were to be eradicated was a question of expediency that Hitler did not directly address. Before the war the deportation or expulsion of Jews could have satisfied the intentions of Hitler. Jews could have been shipped to Madagascar or a similar port. Once the war began, Hitler was content to allow the Jews to suffer violence and to be exterminated in the killing camps. Eradication of Jews from Germany and Europe was Hitler’s intention. The intentions of propagandists may be judged by their omissions as well as their actions. On November 8, 1937, there was an unprecedented outbreak of violence directed at Jews. Allegedly, acts of violence were committed in retaliation for the murder of a German ambassador by a Jew. The next day Hitler could easily have quelled the violence by ordering the police to restrain the public. Instead, Hitler intentionally refrained from issuing that order. The intentional omission of an order to mobilize the police to put down the rioting allowed the violence to escalate without restraint. The genocidal intentions of Hitler toward Jews were evident and longstanding. Jeffrey Herf said, “The evidence indicates that when Hitler, Goebbels, and Dietrich used the words Vernichtung (extermination) and Ausrottung (annihilation), the inhabitants of Nazi Germany understood that those words referred to a policy of mass murder.”16 Gerhard Kittle Gerhard Kittle was a prominent theologian whom we will discuss in a later essay. Ostensibly Kittle was not a propagandist, but his non-theological writings and speeches may be seen as propaganda. This was an individual whose influence was felt upon clergy and religious masses. Kittle

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represents an individual who bought, sold, and unofficially created propaganda. In his 1933 speech, “De Judenfrage,” Kittle spoke openly of the Jewish problem. He supposed there were only four possible solutions to the Jewish problem. They were: (1) extermination; (2) Zionism; (3) assimilation; or (4) guest status.17 Kittle may have been expressing his thoughts about the Jewish population, but he was also voicing the generally accepted view of his day. The presence of Jews in Germany was seen as a problem, and a set of four solutions had been proposed to resolve the problem. Only the first of the four options is necessarily genocidal. Kittle rejected extermination on practical grounds, that is, attempts to exterminate a population had not been successful before. The option of exterminating other persons was seen as possible but not practical. Through his speech Kittle was simply giving voice to a possibility that others had endorsed. In the Holocaust the propagandists of genocide endorsed and promoted extermination as a real possibility to deal with the Jewish population. How could Kittle’s religion justify the possibility that Jews be exterminated? Though the idea is a confusion of historic facts, Jews were said to be the murderers of Jesus. We will discuss this confusion in an upcoming chapter. The ease of transference of blame for the murder of Jesus from a few Jewish leaders to an entire population represents the willingness of the listeners to embrace the propaganda of antisemitism.18 Joseph Goebbels Joseph Goebbels’ appetite for control of the propaganda of Germany in the early twentieth century was insatiable. His ascent to power was not a trouble-free path. Like the NASDP he had to climb to power by asserting his authority. Once the NASDP, that is, the Nazis, were securely in power Goebbels had to continue to fight to maintain his position of power within Hitler’s inner circle. Goebbels had the blessing of Hitler upon his marriage, and Goebbels’ penchant for affairs outside his marriage contributed to his precarious hold on power. His goal was to dominate and shape propaganda that would reach the general population of Germany through any venue he could control including newsprint, radio, film, theater, and the arts. While Goebbels was consumed with a desire to please Hitler and remain in his good favor, Goebbels was no puppet. He and Hitler shared the same views toward Jews, and this shared outlook may have endeared him to

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Hitler in the early days of his career. As early as 1933 Goebbels approved of the boycott of Jewish businesses.19 After the world war was underway, he approved of the use of badges to identify Jews. On August 20, 1941, and in a visit to Vilnius he recommended the extermination of Jews seen to be wandering in the streets of the city.20 His message to the public echoed Hitler’s 1939 message blaming Jews for social unrest. If there was a world war, then the Jews were to be blamed and punished. Did Goebbels know about the extermination of Jews in killing camps? His diaries indicate that he was aware of that Jews were being executed by gunfire, being killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, and being exterminated in gas chambers. He was careful not to communicate this information outside the ranks of the military advisors. Furthermore, he sought to suppress the information lest foreign nations learn of the events and intervene. What seems undeniable is that Goebbels’ propaganda was shaped by genocidal intentions toward Jews. In what way was Goebbels responsible for the death of Jews? If Goebbels’ propaganda may count as a sufficient cause to shape the beliefs and actions of Germans and others toward Jews, then Goebbels was responsible for the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. Goebbels’ message drove individuals to kill as a judge’s court order would drive a doctor to execute a prisoner on death row. The message authorized individuals to act on behalf of the state to kill its enemies, and those enemies were identified as the Jews. Those following the orders had the consolation that they were complying with the directives of the Nazis. One has only to study the rules of Goebbels’ propaganda campaign to understand how effective he was as a propagandist. Leonard Doob’s article, “Goebbels Principles of Propaganda,” compiles Goebbels’ theory and practice into nineteen principles.21 While all may be of interest to the scholar, only a few shall be selected here to illustrate how Goebbels approached his job as the high priest of Nazi propaganda. Principle two claims that there should be one authority that controls propaganda. In theory and in practice Goebbels worked to be that one authority in Germany. Principle seven asserts that propaganda should have a high degree of credibility. Goebbels wanted his propaganda to appear as believable as possible. Principle eleven asserts that propaganda is to be classified as black and white propaganda. Goebbels knew that he could tell and retell the white propaganda of enemy casualties, and he knew that the black propaganda

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of the number of German casualties suffered on the Russian front needed to be reduced as low as possible and needed to be withheld until the last possible moment. Principle thirteen asserts that timing is critical in the dissemination of propaganda. Goebbels knew when to release a good story or when to hold a bad story until it could no longer be held. Principle fourteen asserts that slogans should be used where possible to better reach the whole individual. Goebbels aimed to shape the moral imagination of the German population. The use of slogans elevated the propaganda to the status of memes. The Nazi rallies organized by Goebbels were punctuated with slogans and sing-song chants that would capture the imagination of participants. Principle eighteen asserts that if hatred can have identifiable targets, it can be better managed and channeled. Goebbels followed the lead of Hitler in identifying Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others as hated enemies of the Aryan race and thereby enemies of the state. A later chapter will investigate how the interests of the Aryan race and the state came to be conflated. Walter Grundmann By the close of the nineteenth century, theologians and Biblical scholars in Germany had taken the first steps to align religion with a scientific world view and evolution. Textual references to miracles were relegated to the realm of myth and fantasy, and sacred texts were being reconstructed to align with the modern world view. Germany like most European nations had an official state church, the Lutheran church. Adherents to other religions including Roman Catholics, Jews, or Jehovah Witnesses maintained an amicable relation with Lutherans and remaining Germans, prior to the rise of the NASDP. It was an opportune time for someone who aimed to disengage Western Christianity from its Jewish roots. Walter Grundmann was appointed as the director of the state funded Institute for Study of the Eradication of Jewish Influence (ISEJI). The institute was an intellectual think tank that aimed to disentangle religion in Germany from Judaism. The antisemitic leanings of the institute were intentional and unmistakable. Consistent with its mission, the ISEJI sought to assist the public in the recreation of its national religion, Lutheranism as a religion of the German people. Grundman’s role in promoting an Aryan Jesus dogma will be discussed in greater detail in a

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subsequent chapter. Grundmann was not producing weekly tabloids like Streicher. Instead, the influence of Grundmann and the ISEJI upon religious beliefs, texts, and practices served as a subtle form of propaganda. He was inviting Germans to experience a Christianity and Lutheranism that was Jew-free. For the scholars who engaged in the seminars and publications sponsored by the institute this became a self-affirming mode of communication. Those who presented or published through the institute were sure to receive accolades and support providing that their findings represented the approved bias. To the general public that were onlookers, this scholarly exorcism of Jewish influence would simply reinforce their bias. Again, it would alleviate the hard work of thought and reflection for those who were willing to vilify Jews and others as enemies of the state. Julius Streicher In 1946 Julius Streicher was executed as a war criminal. During his life he was known for his penchant for violence and extra-marital affairs. Robin Linman said, “On the evening of October 20, 1922, the first Nuremberg branch of the National Socialist German Worker’s party was founded at a meeting in the Ludwig Gate Tower by the primary-school teacher Julius Streicher.” Streicher is remembered as the editor of the tabloid, Der Stuermer. The paper was begun as a newsletter to retaliate against Streicher’s enemies. In its early days it was a tabloid that published coarse, questionable, or even pornographic content. It evolved into a tabloid that appealed to the working class. These individuals could consult the latest issue on a public bulletin board to gather news of national interest and of the war. The tabloid was unabashedly antisemitic. Week after week Julius Streicher’s tabloid, Der Stuermer, included the byline, “The Jews are our misfortune!” A large part of the tabloid was devoted to eye catching artwork or photographs. This tabloid circulated as a visual media that vilified the Jews, and it was a perfect complement for public bulletin boards consulted by a public that was hungry for news of the war and the state of the nation. These public bulletin boards were the social media of the moment that reached the German community. They were a propaganda outlet for the masses. Streicher may never have murdered a Jew, but his hatred of Jews was reticent. Working with a selection of Nazi artists, he portrayed Jews as

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criminals, monsters and vampires, and rapists. Artistic rendering of negative stereotypes of Jews became commonplace as a result of his publications. Streicher had the full approval of the Nazi high command. During the height of the war when paper was scarce, Streicher received a sufficient allotment to continue printing the tabloid without interruption. When Streicher did insert his own editorial views, he did unabashedly promote the extermination of Jews to preserve the purity of the Aryan race. For the moral imagination of the public Streicher provided a ready-made picture of Jews as inhuman monsters. Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Himmler was a member of Hitler’s inner circle of leaders. On January 6, 1929, he was appointed to lead the Schutzstaffel, that is, the SS. Before the Nazis came to power this police organization consisted of a few hundred men. Soon it was to grow into an organization of thousands. The organization led by Himmler was responsible for internal security of the nation and the purity of the race. Himmler’s SS officers administered the concentration camps that became killing centers. Its task of maintaining the purity of the race shall be discussed in greater depth in a subsequent chapter. While Himmler’s role as a perpetrator of genocide has received considerable attention, he also served a key role in the Nazi regime as a propagandist. The propaganda of Kittle and Grundmann appealed to the religious community with their claims about the nature of Western religion. The propaganda of Streicher appealed to the German public with his graphic tabloids. The propaganda of Goebbels appealed to the German public and the international community through the news media and the arts. Goebbels propaganda managed the day-to-day information Germany would hear through radio or newsprint such as casualties on the front or foreign soldiers captured during the war. Himmler’s propaganda appealed to the public and international community also, but it was propaganda that was well suited for the inner Nazi circle. It was a propaganda of history and archeology. Himmler was telling Hitler and his sympathizers something they wanted to hear. Himmler was responsible for a learned society, the Ahnenerbe. This institute was a complement for the Institute for the Eradication of Jewish Influence (IEJI) run by Grundmann. Unlike the IEJI, the Ahnenerbe was not attempting to disprove or eradicate Jewish elements from German life

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and history per se. Rather it aimed to confirm certain Nazi suppositions about the origin of races, the nature of the Aryan race, and the potential of that race. While Himmler maintained control of the Ahnenerbe, he collected researchers and scientists to staff the society. Herman Wirth was a recognized German prehistorian of the decade, and he came on staff around 1935. In The Master Plan, Heather Pringle notes, “[Wirth] was convinced he had found an ancient holy script invented by a lost Nordic civilization in the North Atlantic many thousands of years ago.”22 Wirth was attempting to reconstruct the origins of the Aryan race. Scholars sympathetic with the assertions of Wirth were retained by the society. Since the society was funded by the Nazis and served at their pleasure, they could draw on their boundless funds to conduct their research junkets. One of the early and perhaps more promising research trips was a search for a lost Nordic civilization. The supposition was that pure Aryans traced their origin from these areas. Prehistoric rock etchings in Denmark and the region were sought to give credence to the prehistory narrative that was unfolding. On these geological and archeological expeditions Wirth would find fossilized plants in artic regions and more. These he took to be indicators that humans lived and flourished in these regions, and from these ancestors it was supposed that the pure Aryan race emerged. These expeditions became expansive and all encompassing. Trips to Tibet and Africa would be made to find or to embellish the growing theory of the origin of races. Biological and social faults present in the German society were traceable to foreign, that is non-Aryan elements. A comparison of the races of the world confirmed to Himmler and his ilk the superiority of the Aryans. Some of the theories that Wirth and the Ahnenerbe supported were rejected by the larger scientific community. For instance, Hans Horbiger’s notion that the world began as a result of an ice age were considered by other scholars to be suspect.23 Nonetheless, the Ahnenerbe served a vital purpose in the view of Hitler’s inner circle. It offered a defense of the notion that the Aryan race was a superior race that gave rise to the German people. Likewise, this race had ownership rights to the properties its ancestors possessed. How could the Nazis justify the invasion of Russia’s Crimea? By asserting that ownership of the region was traceable to the Gothic tribes that conquered and subdued the region, and these Gothic tribes of prehistory were the ancestors of the Germans.24

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This same sort of thinking justified the Nazis in seizing Polish artwork and treasures. The circular reasoning that justified these invasions and thefts was unquestioned and unchecked. Himmler’s scholarly society reasoned that in prehistory Aryans were those who succeeded by conquest. The artwork and treasures of Poland should belong to the Nazis, and the prized Russian territories should belong to the Nazis who were worthy of holding them. Nazis were worthy of holding these treasures since they were the true descendants of the Aryans. By seizing these treasures and these territories the Nazis confirmed that they were pure Aryan descendants, and those who were worthy of holding these treasures and territories were Aryans. Both Hitler and Goebbels chose to commit suicide before the allies could reach them rather than risk capture by the allies. Streicher was captured, tried and executed for his role in the war. To the end he was not remorseful for inciting the violence of the German people. It was the conclusion of the court that Streicher’s inflammatory publications were a contributing cause to the mass murder of Jews. Himmler was captured for trial, but he managed to end his life by taking a poison capsule. In contrast, Grundmann was not prosecuted for his role in the war and remained active in academia for several years after the war.

What Shadows of Propaganda were Cast? Many have questioned whether the German public could have known that Hitler and the Nazis intended to exterminate Jews.25 Jeffrey Herf said, “If a person could understand German, read a major newspaper, listen to the radio news with some regularity, and view the ubiquitous Nazi political wall newspapers, he or she would know this basic fact.” 26 The genocidal intent of the Nazis to exterminate Jews permeated the propaganda of the era. By newsprint, tabloids, posters, and radio broadcasts the German people were given a steady diet of the propaganda of hate. The propaganda of hate justified the disrespect of the Jews. Here only a few representations shall be given attention. Consider one among many antisemitic posters intended to denounce Jews. Emerging from the 1924 German election period was a memorable poster, “Der Drahtzieher.” One may safely suppose the artist intended to tug at the emotions of the Germans with the cartoon of the “string-puller.” In the background smoking chimneys suggest an era of industrial production, and in the foreground a multitude of laborers are depicted. Attached to each laborer is a string firmly grasped by

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the string-puller himself. Herf suggests this depicts the exploitation of the German worker by the capitalist.27 This string-puller is an obese businessman clothed in a waistcoat, vest, and derby. The Star of David locket dangling from his watch chain confirms his ethnic identity as a Jew. The ethnic association was overt and intentional. In the months that followed, Hitler would repeatedly refer to Jews as the wirepullers and the string-­ pullers who were said to be the cause of the troubles of Germany. This picture appealed to the moral imagination of the public by treating Jews as inhuman and objects worthy of disrespect. Consider the ritual murder cartoon. The July 1938 edition of Der Sturmer featured a pen and ink graphic that depicted a ritual murder of a German by Jews (Liskiotto). Some individuals purported to be Jews surround a huge caldron with kindling stacked at its base for a fire. A lithe female figure is being pulled into the caldron. Viewers would have seen this as the depiction of a ritual sacrifice. When persons suddenly disappear in any community, questions are raised along with a suspicion of criminal activity. One urban legend of the time was that Jews kidnapped children or adults for ritual sacrifices. While the legend may have been baseless, it was useful in reinforcing the myth that Jews were criminals who would rape or slaughter innocent Germans. Consider the byline repeated in most editions of Das Sturmer. It said, “The Jews are our Misfortune.” These overt declarations of racism and antisemitic rhetoric that appeared week after week on public bulletin boards confirmed the biases of the general population against Jews. If they chose to respond to Jews with hatred and violence, they were justified in their moral imagination.

The German Propaganda Diet Given the strong personalities of individuals like Goebbels, Streicher, and Himmler one might anticipate a spirit of competition and rivalry that could undermine propaganda. Goebbels jealously sought the approbation of Hitler as did other members of Hitler’s elite circle. Nonetheless, the German public received a relatively consistent diet of propaganda that favored the Nazis and vilified the Jews. As minister of propaganda Goebbels monitored all official communications of the German state. The ‘Gleichschaltung” process succeeded in homogenizing the values and message that the German public would receive in news, arts, and in the

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theatre. The work of the other propagandists contributed to the overall messages intended for the German folk. Earlier in this study Adolf Hitler was identified as a propagandist. He was a source of propaganda, but he was also a focus of propaganda that served as a rallying point for the nation. Not until the late stage of the war when defeat seemed immanent, and the German people suffered the depravations of war did the loyalty of the inner circle begin to wane. To the end some individuals like Goebbels cultivated and competed for the attention of their leader. If Goebbels felt slighted by Hitler, then he suffered greatly. The varying sources and strains of propaganda converged in approbation of Hitler to create what amounted to a Hitler myth. According to this fanciful view Hitler did no wrong. This may account for Hitler’s aversion to signing or issuing orders that could be controversial or inflammatory. Pine says, “Hitler was popular as a leader among all social groups and was personally exempted from criticisms of the regime. Any blame was always directed at other Nazi leaders. The Hitler myth enabled people to voice their quotidian grumbles and concerns yet consent to the Nazi regime as a whole.”28 In the arts there was a concerted effort to eliminate the Jewish influence and to elevate the arts that affirmed the value of the Aryans. Pine writes, “The desire of the Nazi regime to purify and cleans society was reflected in its policy towards the arts, with its simultaneous process of encouraging pure and wholesome contemporary German art and purging decadent, ‘degenerate’ or unwholesome art.”29 Book burning and censorship of Jewish authors were understood to be good for the people. When the works of some Jews, communists, and other authors were banned or even burned, these steps were viewed as paternalistic steps that would safeguard the values and minds of the people. To complement this campaign of ignorance the education of Jews was banned. Pine writes, as in other areas of cultural life, National Socialism was keen to remove the influence of Jewish and Bolshevik writers from German literature. The Nazi regime approved literature that was pure and wholesome, a racially based literature that would serve to underpin its political aims.…All Jewish writers were excluded from membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature.30

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Effects Upon the Prisoners in the Cave of Ignorance Propaganda is prized for its ability to connote values of approbation or disapprobation whether it accurately denote facts or if not. Propaganda is a speedy means to reinforce a prejudice to hate the other and love self. Propaganda assumes that the prejudicial in-group has correctly identified the out-­group. For the propagandists their message is a reaffirmation of prejudicial hate of the out-group. For the public consumers of the propaganda the message is informative of how they should regard the outgroup. In Germany propaganda identified enemies within the state such as the Jews, the Roma, and others. Anyone who could potentially corrupt the blood line of the Aryan race was considered to be an enemy. In his book, The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport said, “The concepts of in-group and reference group help us to distinguish two levels of belongingness. The former indicates the sheer fact of membership; the latter tells us whether the individual prizes that membership or whether he seeks to relate himself with another group.’31 Within the Hitler myth there was a sense of belongingness for the in-group of Aryans. They became the reference group for those who possessed dignity and worth. Recall the five types of rejective behavior identified by Allport.32 Varying forms of hate speech count as the first type of antilocution. They are speech against members of the out-group. We can easily identify the speech and communications of the Nazi propagandists as antilocutions. Were they something more? Intermingled with their hate-based propaganda the propagandists implicitly or explicitly licensed Germans to act upon more violent types of rejective behavior. In other words, they commanded their audience to engage in avoidance, discrimination, and even execution. Germans were directed to avoid commerce and contact with Jews. Jews were forced to wear a badge to mark their ethnicity. Some propagandists like Streicher explicitly endorsed the extermination of Jews. Whether extermination was to be brought about by starvation, a bullet, or by poison gas was left to the imagination of the persons receiving the message. A good case may be made for freedom of speech, and that may include freedom to generate propaganda. Free speech is benign when it is simply the sharing of values pro or con. Free speech can become vicious when it moves beyond the sharing of values to the prescribing of actions that would be inconsistent with the valuation of the right to life. While there may be quantitative elements to propaganda, that is, matters of fact,

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propaganda is value laden communication. The values latent in propaganda can determine who is classified in the in-group or the out-group. When that classification entails the denial of basic human rights, propaganda then becomes a license for discrimination; and discrimination is immoral. This happens when propaganda not only identifies the outgroup but also prescribes discrimination or violence toward members of this group. When the accompanying communication contains prescriptions to act upon the basis of discriminatory propaganda, it can lead to genocidal behavior. When the right to free speech is prostituted to become an occasion for hate speech, it creates a conflict with the right to life.

Conclusions Propagandists and their audience exist in a symbiotic relationship. They depend upon one another to thrive. Likewise, the liar and the credulous exist in a symbiotic relationship. The former depends on the latter to receive the message and to believe or act upon it. Propaganda may have some value for its audience, lies have little value for the credulous. The truly autonomous individual can defend himself or herself by remaining skeptical or by holding judgment at bay, but it is rare that one will succeed in doing so in all aspects of life. Social existence requires trust, and trust can be easily misplaced. Propagandists must sell themselves on the value of their propaganda. The famous propagandists of the twentieth century in the West were selling commercialism and consumerism.33 In their book, Image Makers, Jackall and Hirtoa point out that propagandists make use of a fictional public opinion to utilize the psychological momentum of the bandwagon. The public accepts this or that as true, and you should agree with the public. Individuals in the early twentieth century may have been doubtful of the value of consumerism, but they had to come to terms with the value of its acceptance by the masses. Propagandists sell the value of the story, or they sell or the effect of the propaganda or both. In the early years of the Nazi party and during the war the Nazi propagandists were sold on the story of Nazism and the ancestral protocol. That commitment began to wane toward the end of the war, but the Nazi leadership who had become skeptics refused to allow the masses to see that they had lost faith. Even when they became skeptical regarding the story of propaganda, they were convinced of the value of its ability to affect the

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masses. Members of the high command like Goebbels may have believed that the war was lost, but they urged the public to fight on. Those willing to succumb to the vison of the propagandists allow themselves to be swept along toward the ends envisioned by the propagandists. Within a propaganda campaign that affirms the privilege of the few, the roles are well defined, and they enable perpetrators to distinguish intended victims from the remaining population. The propaganda offers a justification for the victimization of a few. Implicit in this justification is a defense of the perpetrators. In the story of propaganda bystanders assume the role of the unknowing and innocent. The propaganda story allowed bystanders not to act directly or intentionally. The propaganda objectified the values of the propagandists, and it anticipated the division that would follow of the people into perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and rescuers. Those who embraced the values of hatred found an ideological justification to enter into their role as perpetrators. Those who found themselves to be degraded by these values became the victims of the propaganda. The targeted population could attempt to hide their identity, own their identity and acquiesce to the violence outsiders were to experience, or they could embrace their identity and resist. Propaganda left some as bystanders who were neither victims nor propagandists. Given the dominant role of persuasion, could the masses dissuade themselves from believing or following the propaganda? A few did, but they were the exceptional individuals like the slave who broke free in the parable of the cave. A few bystanders would see the propaganda as a denial of the right to life and resist it; thus, they would become rescuers. Perhaps the bystanders struggled most with their identity, since the propagandists sought to assimilate those who were not victims into the vision they cast. Other bystanders would refuse to engage themselves with the propaganda rationally or emotionally. When the rescuers liberated the victims in the concentration camps, many bystanders who were the neighbors living nearby would plead ignorance of the events in the camps. Yet, through their complicity these bystanders would become contributing causes in the causal chains that led to genocide. The complicity of the bystanders shall be discussed in greater detail in a separate section. In this chapter we have reviewed the life and thought of some prominent propagandists in the Holocaust—Hitler, Goebbels, Streicher, Grundmann, and Himmler. Their individual contributions to their propaganda enabled the mass of persons to tolerate and even participate in the

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violence that targeted Jews and other victims for death. The victims experienced how unfounded claims of propaganda can convince a crowd to engage in violence and mass killings. Earlier it was shown that the Nazis used legal proceedings to strip Jews and others of their rights. Antisemitic propaganda complemented this campaign to strip individuals of their rights by providing a social justification for the mistreatment of Jews and others. Together these represented the completion of the first three of Stanton’s stages of genocide—Classification, Symbolization, and Discrimination. This also was moving into the fourth stage of dehumanization. The public buy-in of the propaganda enabled the perpetrators of genocide to encounter minimal social resistance in Germany before reaching the critical stages of persecution and extermination. Claudia Card distinguished metaphysical and moral excuses.34 The former would give an actor a pass, since it is supposed that having a metaphysical excuse is a declaration that the actor could not do otherwise. For moral excuses there is no such pass. The propagandists intentionally chose to communicate their prejudicial propaganda that prescribed discrimination and possibly more. This intentional action brooks no excuse. What about the persons who embraced their propaganda? We noted earlier that propaganda fills a niche for finite persons who cannot possibly vet every belief, value, or recommendation. They must choose to trust someone who becomes their reference for propaganda. However, their susceptibility to hate-driven propaganda cannot stand as a metaphysical excuse.

Notes 1. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1070736018 2. Great Dialogues of Plato (New York: New American Library, 1956), 312. 3. Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography. Translated by Alan Bance et  al. (New York: Random House, 2015), 48. 4. Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 48. 5. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 249. 6. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 249. 7. Jason J. Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent (New York: Lexington Books, 2013), 32. 8. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice: Unabridged. 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Perseus Books, 1979), 49. 9. See Stanton’s 10 stages: https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages

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10. Robert Jackall and Janice M.  Hirota, Image Makers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 11. Jackall and Hirota, Image Makers, 4. 12. Jackall and Hirota, Image Makers, 6. 13. Lisa Pine, Hitler’s ‘National Community’ (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007), 18. 14. Adolf Hitler et al. Mein Kampf (New York: Hutchinson, 1969), 325. 15. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 623. 16. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (New York: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 276. 17. Robert P.  Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985), 55f. 18. Through this work I shall make use of the terms “anti-Judaism” and antisemitism. Both terms target Jews as objects of hatred, but the latter term is more comprehensive. Anti-Judaism is assumed to be hatred toward Jews and Judaism based on their religion and practices. Antisemitism also includes hatred of the economics, culture, and ethnicity of Jews. I thank Kyle Jantzen for his discussions of these terms during a seminar hosted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 25, 2021, and his subsequent clarification of their use among scholars. 19. Longereich, Goebbels, 218. 20. Longereich, Goebbels, 490, 500. 21. Leonard Doob’s “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda,” Public Opinion Quarterly 14 (3, 1950): 419–442. 22. Heather Pringle, The Master Plan (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 54. 23. Pringle, The Master Plan, 180. 24. Pringle, The Master Plan, 232–235. 25. See Jay W. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 1939–1945. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1974). 26. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, 33. 27. Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 33. 28. Pine, Hitler’s “National Community,” 25. 29. Pine, Hitler’s “National Community,” 200. 30. Pine, Hitler’s “National Community,” 221. 31. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 40. 32. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 49. 33. Jackall and Hirota, Image Makers, 6. 34. Card, Confronting Evils, 6.

CHAPTER 5

Self-Entitlement for the Chosen Few

Introduction This chapter investigates how killing non-Aryans could be justified. In genocide the stage of dehumanization places “them,” that is, the victims outside the pale of ethical concern. Perpetrators deny the humanity of their victims. Speaking of stage four of genocide, dehumanization, Stanton says, “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.“1 Some dehumanization appears in the propaganda discussed in the previous chapter. What should not be overlooked is the crossing of a threshold. Persons whose rights were diminished are treated as inhuman things lacking dignity and rights. How did this mind-set become so widespread? One’s ancestry is a matter of moral luck, but the Nazis saw Aryan ancestry as their entitlement. Nazis used the Aryan Protocol to classify persons of Aryan descent and non-Aryans. The defense of an exclusive Aryan right to life amounts to special pleading. Under the guise of eugenics Nazis tested on persons who were institutionalized the efficiency of various types of mass murder. Having acquired the know-how to kill in mass, Nazis officials directed subordinates to kill those they deemed to be enemies of the state. The majority of subordinates willingly acted upon those orders rather than resisting and confronting ridicule or censure. The realpolitik

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posture of Germany positioned it to deny some members of society their basic rights including the right to life. How could mass murder be justified? The Bible story of Cain’s murder of Able is the story of murder by brute force accompanied by deception.2 One jealous brother lures the other into a remote location to kill him. He acts with brute force, and the brother is slain. It is likely he was bludgeoned to death. Justification for Abel’s murder is lacking. The Bible story of Naboth’s murder is a complex story of false witnesses, an arranged execution, and the seizure of a coveted property.3 A cruel and power-­ grabbing wife, Jezebel, arranges for a death sentence to be pronounced on an innocent man, and she ensures that the court takes immediate steps to carry out the execution. Naboth is stoned to death. A coroner would say he died of blunt force trauma. Intent, planning, and practical steps to achieve the desired outcomes were part of the narrative. The murder was diabolical. No adequate excuses can be offered for these murderers. The reader investigating the Holocaust like the reader of the Biblical stories sees the actors in genocide and the outcome, and still the reader may ask: How it is possible that a murder or mass murders can happen and be justified? In his book, Why did they Kill? the anthropologist and genocide scholar, Alexander Hinton, gives us some insights into the causes of the Cambodian genocide. The reader sees the actors, the contributing causes, and yet there are lingering questions about how it is possible. In Ordinary Men, the historian Christopher R. Browning reassuring readers that genocide did happen, and that ordinary men or women were murders. Browning is considered by some to be a situationist, that is, a historian who explains the events based on the situation rather than an extraordinary cause such as a unique racism.4 This author supposes that killing is situational in the sense that concrete situations call for actors to make ethical decisions that result in practical consequences. Situational details like peer pressure or superior orders may explain the killing, but they fail as mitigating excuses. A later chapter shall review individual responses and collective political responses to a campaign of mass murder. After Simon Wiesenthal had established himself as a Nazi hunter, other survivors would appeal to him to identify perpetrators who may have gone into hiding and to bring them to justice. One woman writing to Wiesenthal asked that he find and bring to trial a man named Pal. The investigation revealed the real name of the guard to be Phal. The cruelty of the guard was exceptional. He was known for killing infants by smashing their skulls

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against walls or other stationary objects. This excessive use of force established the actor’s mens rea. The plea of the woman gave Wiesenthal cause to ask himself how this sort of inhumane murder was possible.5 This chapter does not offer a psychological profile of the thinking of mass murders like Heinrich Himmler. Rather the study is a philosophical reflection on the practical, logical, and theoretical steps that have contributed to a genocide like the Holocaust. Dehumanizing victims can occur in any society. The Nazis developed a practical and straightforward method of identifying those who had the right to life. The logical justification for the notion that German Aryans had an exclusive right to life lay in their understanding of race and the state’s defense of Nazi racism. Their racism provided a rationale for German Aryans to disregard the rights of non-­ Aryans whom they dehumanized. The Nazis’ claim of entitlement provides a case study in the abuse of moral luck. This author takes moral luck to be simply the convergence of happenstance and temporality, and that is mere finitude. Moral luck systemically positions individuals in societies to their advantage or disadvantage. Within those societies individuals claim to have rights and privileges or advantages and disadvantages. Mere finitude dictates that some trees on the north side of a slope may benefit from direct exposure to the sun whereas some trees on the south side of the same slope may suffer from underexposure to sunlight. Mere finitude dictates that a woman born in the United States before women’s suffrage would not have the right to vote in a general election. Unlike trees and immovable objects, moral actors are responsible for embracing and making use of their mere finitude for good or bad. How Nazis abused their mere finitude may be discovered by an investigation into their claiming and asserting their extraordinary racial privilege. 6

A Protocol to Distinguish the Us and Them in the Holocaust Children preparing to play zero-sum games will choose sides. The gameplay could be a tug of war or a spelling bee with teams. The zero-sum game predisposes the sides to become winners or losers in varying degrees. The significance of winning or losing will be contingent on the nature of the game.

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The Nazis made use of an efficient method of determining who was part of the in-group and who was not, and that was the ancestral protocol. In 1939 citizens of Germany were required to document their ancestry and record the findings with the Genealogical Authority. Upon examination a German could be classified in one of seven or more categories: (1) German-blooded and Aryan; (2) German blooded; (3) Valid as German-­ blooded; (4) Second-degree Mischling and non-Aryan; (5) First-degree Mischling and non-Aryan; (6) Jew and non-Aryan; or (7) Alien-blooded or a variation thereof.7 The classification formed an artificial hierarchy with a desirable genealogy at the upper level (1 -2), and lesser genealogies fell thereafter. 8 This method of determining one’s group identity made use of notions about race, ethnicity, and ideology already in place. It did not create distinctions, nor did it rely on natural distinctions, but it formalized racist distinctions that individuals in society already accepted. The Nazi ancestral protocol did not use modern genetics. Use of DNA testing would have undermined the Nazi process that relied on genealogical evidence, since it would confirm that humans are descendants of a common ancestry. Nor did the protocol make use of medical science per se. Its primary method of establishing one’s ancestry was genealogy, that is, one’s family lineage. This was traceable chiefly through birth certificates provided by the church or state. This record would first establish the matriarchal genealogy and subsequently identify the patriarchal genealogy.9 One could on oath swear to one’s ancestry and corroborate the testimony with genealogical documents. The Nazi ancestral protocol did not make persons good Aryans, but it aimed to confirm them as good Aryans or not. A good Aryan was an individual whose ancestry was descended from a race of people in pre-history with recognizable morphological traits acceptable to the German population such as blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. The scientific race theory of the age determined what the Aryan race already denoted and connoted. Scientific race theory used early genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory to assert that humanity could be divided into distinct races. It supposed that races and not ethnicities were distinct entities with their own genetic and sociological traits. Science would subsequently disprove the notion people were genetically distinct. In this view being Aryan or Jewish or Roma was in one’s blood and not just in one’s ethnicity. The process of the Nazi ancestral protocol formalized the antisemitism and incipient racism that was prevalent in Europe more than a century before. Himmler’s efforts to trace the Aryan race to its origins supported

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the work of the Genealogical Authority, but it was not required for the work to go on. By examining the verdicts rendered in questionable cases, one discovers how flimsy the test for ancestry could be. The first line of evidence to be reviewed was the birth certificate. That would establish matriarchy. If non-­ Aryan parentage was evident in the matriarchy, then the person in review was likely to be a Jew or Roma, or alien. Patriarchy was not as easily established. The person who sired the child could be misidentified or missing altogether from the certificate. In those cases, additional evidence would be required. For instance, in one questionable ancestry case the date and place of conception of the person had to be established by the testimony of the father. The subject cited a guest registry entry of a hotel as evidence of his ancestry.10 It was argued that the father and mother conceived the child at the hotel on the date indicated on the hotel registry. In desperation some individuals would claim to be adopted rather than admitting their rightful paternal ancestry. If a case could not be settled by the usual means, examiners could resort to an examination of racial traits. These could be physiological traits, or they could include psychological traits. Examiners would ask, “Does the subject have Jewish hair, a Jewish nose, or other ‘tell-tale’ markings as a Jew?” To make judgments about Jewish hair an index of German hair types and non-German hair types was used. If the subject displayed tell-­ tale characteristics that were non-Aryan or Jewish, then the case could be decided against a pure Aryan ancestry. Religious associations with Jews were considered sufficient evidence to declare the person to be a non-­ Aryan. Also, if it could be shown that the individual was a freethinker like Jews were said to be, the case would be decided against the individual. Given the favorable national status of Aryans some individuals were inclined to renounce their ancestry. Individuals would claim that their ancestors had abandoned Judaism and had been converted to Lutheranism. One woman even claimed her father was not Jewish, since he had a Christian character.11 These pleas were frequently rejected unless the Jewish ancestry appeared later than the third generation, that is, in the great-great grandparents. Recent conversion to the Christian religion was not seen by the Nazis as a reason to believe a person was no longer a Jew. The Aryan protocol invited abuse in a number of ways. The procedure assumed that the genealogical data identifying the mother was reliable even if the data identifying the father needed to be validated. If data was missing, it was an invitation to fabricate details of ancestry to the

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advantage or disadvantage of the individual in review. Also, the veracity of one’s ancestry could be challenged. Well-connected persons or officials had the ability to prod the Genealogical Association into extraordinary investigations to undermine the reputation of some. Not infrequently the procedure was abused to satisfy a judge’s ulterior motives. The procedure of validating one’s ancestry with the Genealogical Association was a formality. The census itself provided quantitative data and proved to be a challenge to privacy. The data created an objective basis for discrimination and dehumanization of Jews and non-Aryans. The distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans is non-natural, that is, a putative difference dictated by racial bias. The procedure formalized and validated racial biases that defended the rights of some and denied the rights of others. The social rewards and punishments that resulted from having one ancestry or another were manifestations of an immoral code of behavior rewarding one variety of ancestry and punishing another. The ancestral protocol gave Nazis a formal procedure for saying If X is a non-Aryan, then X ought to be denied the favorable treatment given Aryans. Philosophers will recognize in this a violation of the is-and-ought distinction. It does not follow logically that a non-Aryan ought to be denied their rights such as a right to life.

When Rights become a Matter of Life and Death Again, the question is asked: Why did perpetrators of genocide kill? Why did they kill in Rwanda? Why did they kill in Cambodia? Why did they kill in Myanmar? Why did they kill in Germany? While the circumstances in the former cases may have differed widely, it is the circumstances in Holocaust in Germany that are discussed here. To understand better how citizens of Germany and individuals in occupied territories could be murdered in a genocide we may investigate another mass murder campaign within the country. The T-4 campaign was a mass atrocity though it was not a genocide. Instead, the victims were institutionalized individuals who were clinically declared to be handicapped, insane, or suicidal. T-4 was a eugenics campaign that aimed to render selected Germans incapable of reproducing offspring. It was supposed that these individuals would pass on physical handicaps or unwanted psychological traits to their offspring. Some were sterilized, but most were euthanized. The shortest route to eliminating

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the next generation of unwanted offspring was the killing of potential parents. The T-4 project was short lived since there was a public outcry from the victims’ relatives. Beloved family members were disappearing or were reported to have died under questionable circumstances. After the fact a family might be informed that a member who was institutionalized for schizophrenia had succumbed to natural causes. In many instances those so-called natural causes turned out to be asphyxiation in a specially outfitted van that pumped carbon monoxide into a sealed compartment in the van. Care was taken to shield the public from the nature of this campaign. Frederich Lenz, one of the persons responsible for administering the program argued that it would be best for society if nearly one million disabled persons of German birth were sacrificed to purify the race.12 When this campaign became widely known, the clergy publicly protested against the activity.13 The program ended abruptly, but not before Nazis had achieved some of their intended goals. The goal of eliminating from the population individuals who could allegedly transmit handicaps to their offspring was achieved on a limited basis. The additional goal of learning the best methods for factory-like mass murder techniques during the T-4 campaign was an added benefit in the thinking of Nazis. Carbon monoxide could produce the death of the prisoners in sealed vans, and poison gas could likewise kill masses of victims. The Nazis had learned how to kill quickly and efficiently large groups of persons. The trial method of using poison gas became a preferred method of mass killing. Mass killing did not require that the killers be in direct contact with the victims. In the T-4 project subjects were euthanized, that is, they were expected to die. In the medical experiments carried out on Jews and non-Aryans during the Holocaust, the death of the subjects was seen as incidental. T-4 victims were not competent to offer their consent to the proceedings. The T-4 project was halted, since there was a public outcry on behalf of the persons who were wrongfully euthanized. Individuals like the Bishop of Limburg raised a public alarm.14 This public outcry threatened to undermine the popularity of German leadership, especially that of Hitler. In contrast in the life-threatening medical experiments of the Holocaust the victims were competent. Nonetheless the victims were denied the right to offer consent, since they were non-Aryans. They were dehumanized. In the T-4 campaign the intent was to immediately kill or sterilize the patient. In the medical experiments carried on in the concentration camps

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the lives of the victims had some utility. However, the instrumental value of their lives offered no protection to shield victims from death. Among the many medical experiments conducted by the Nazis were malaria experiments, mustard gas experiments, and typhus experiments. Eugene Kogan, a survivor, reported that during the typhus experiments some subjects were infected with typhus by contact with contagious lice or through an injection of blood containing typhus. The blood was drawn from a group of persons who were infected for the express purpose of providing contaminated blood to infect other subjects. These “passage persons” had no purpose in the experiment other than the preservation of the virus. Kogan said, “Very nearly all those [passage] persons died. I do not think I am exaggerating if I say that 95 percent of these cases were fatal.”15 Experimental vaccines were administered to the patients, but most proved ineffective against the infection and the victims would die. All who were participants in the experiments lived under a constant death threat. To refuse treatment was to invite immediate death by a gunshot or similar means.16 Mass killing in concentration camps was carried out under controlled conditions. By comparison the killing that occurred in occupied lands most often required that a single individual would bring about the death of one or more persons. Those killed were not soldiers but civilians and innocents. These civilians were killed by soldiers or police officers as if they were combatants. Historians debate if the situation itself prompted the murders, or if extraordinary social forces were sufficient to drive the individuals to kill. On the surface this appears to be an investigation of ordinary versus extraordinary social circumstances. To cite extraordinary social forces or ordinary circumstances as the driving force behind the mass murders seems to gloss over the existential crisis facing murderers. Even those who became habitual killers had to make their first kill. They had to pull the trigger to fire the shot that would kill, or they had to wield the truncheon that would bludgeon a person to death. Preceding the practical denial of the right to life there was a social and psychological denial of those rights. In other words, the murderer had decided that the intended victims did not deserve to live and acted out that decision. In the T-4 campaign someone like Lenz decided that handicapped individuals should die for the good of the blood line. To execute the campaign additional persons were needed like van drivers who would lock individuals in a van compartment and expose them to carbon monoxide poisoning. Knowing that the van

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compartments were designed to kill, the van driver had to decide that the intended victims did not deserve to live. Antisemitic bias in the region provided a social precondition for the Nazis denial of a right to life for Jews. Psychologically members of the police force or military could believe that Jews were denied the right to life. That accounts for the extraordinary circumstances. The killing under orders and in the presence of peers may account for the ordinariness. Orders offered by military commanders or state police agencies would command individuals to pull the trigger for the first time. As soldiers and officers, they had to obey or plead that they could not. Nonetheless, this first kill required a decision by the actor to murder someone. Dehumanization enabled killers to believe that the persons they murdered were not humans but something other.

Anatomy of a Mass Murder At first glance the disjunction of extraordinary social circumstances or ordinary wartime orders offers two likely ways of explaining how mass murders can be executed. The disjunction asserts either killing happened under extraordinary circumstances or killing happened in the theater of war. Both disjuncts are intended to direct attention for mass killing to the action of a collective. Collectives may share in the responsibility for mass murder, and those who issue superior orders to kill alleged enemies may share in the responsibility. However, that should not be conflated with individual responsibility within a mass murder. The problem of the responsibility for orders that would result in mass murder may be explored later. It is assumed that solders who acted under orders understand that those same orders uphold a basic distinction between the treatment of combatants and non-combatants. Consider how orders from Nazis superiors would have initiated a campaign of mass murder to fill a mass grave. Suppose that a standing order has been issued that Jews in an outlying village should be rounded up for extermination. A commanding officer would oversee the coordinated activities of subordinates. Intelligence would be gathered. A ravine near a graveyard would be identified as the site for collecting Jews. If that was not conveniently available, villagers could dig a quick ditch. Subordinates would be directed to supervise the construction of the ravine, to gather the Jewish population, and to execute the Jewish population at the site.

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The primitive bodily movements to be carried out by subordinates would be obvious to both the subordinates and their superiors. The soldier had to load an ordinance, aim the weapon, pull a trigger. The subordinate would know that the outcome would result in death. The consequences were obvious. These primitive bodily movements would be performed at their discretion. In other words, each subordinate would decide to shoot a living person in the base of his or her skull to bring about the person’s death. Repetition of the movement could conceivably make the action psychologically easier, but it would not change the outcome. The subordinate would expect each ordinance fired to result in a kill. The first act would be sufficient to identify the actor as one who was responsible for killing. The killing could not be dismissed as excusable since it was not the killing of a combatant by a combatant. It was the killing of a non-­ combatant by a soldier, and that amounts to murder. Individual responsibility of perpetrators in mass murder at concentration camps may be analyzed in a comparable way. Suppose a subordinate in a concentration camp was given orders by a superior officer to eliminate, that is, murder a mass of incoming prisoners deemed unfit to preform work in the camp. The prisoners would be herded into a mock shower. Once located there the subordinate would supervise the operation that would kill the prisoners. The subordinate would make the primitive bodily movements of dropping a canister of Zyklon B pellets down a chute into the sealed chamber. The consequences of the bodily movement would be predictable. Upon release the pellets would vaporize and the resulting toxic gas would kill the persons sealed in the chamber. The perpetrator who dropped the canister would be responsible for killing nearly a hundred persons in the sealed chamber. Yes, the solder acted under orders; but the soldier did not engage with a morally equivalent soldier. The soldier killed non-combatants, and that amounts to murder. While the subordinate would have acted under orders, the orders did not provide the actor with a mitigating excuse to alleviate responsibility for killing. If the soldier killed soldiers in an exchange of fire, then the soldier could plead that the action was excusable. The exculpation of blame for soldiers killing soldiers follows from the assumed moral equivalence of combatants at war. Those Jewish private citizens who were killed in the Holocaust were non-combatants. While they may have been alleged enemies of the state, they were nonetheless unarmed civilians. Moral judgements regarding genocide are to be distinguished from legal or political judgements. Suppose Fritz was member of the Wehrmacht

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who participated in a mass murder of Jews in a village in Czechoslovakia. As a subordinate Fritz could invoke the standard reply that he was merely following orders. The excuse that Nazi subordinates were merely following orders when they killed Jews is an example of a blanket excuse intended to cover an entire class of actors, and it is an excuse that fails. There are several reasons why Fritz’s excuse that he was following orders fails as a mitigating excuse. The superior orders excuse is a thinly veiled attempt to make a bandwagon appeal or an appeal to authority. On the one hand, it seems to imply that everyone else was doing it, and the actor should be able to do likewise. On the other hand, it seems to shift responsibility to the superiors who issued the command. Responsibility for issuance of the command to kill civilian non-combatants should not be conflated with the responsibility for having acted upon the command to kill. The weakness of the blanket excuse is demonstrated when one considers the changes that would have been required for Fritz’s excuse to count as a mitigating excuse. We expect that Fritz will exercise some reasoning faculties to determine when to shoot and when not to shoot, even if he chooses to act upon a command. Fritz is murdering non-combatants, but if there were reason for Fritz to believe that these were combatants or belligerents, then the excuse could become plausible. The belief would find some justification if Fritz had evidence that the intended victims were combatants but were in disguise, if the victims were dressed as combatants, if the victims were bearing arms alongside belligerents, or if the victims appeared in the line of fire with genuine combatants. Lacking those details, Fritz could only conclude that the intended victims were civilians and that their killing could not be written off as collateral damage. When Fritz pulled the trigger to kill a Jew who was a non-combatant with no excuse other than that he was following orders, Fritz committed murder. Can it be said that Fritz had mens re? Yes, since this was an intentional action toward individuals who were not combatants. Guenter Lewy documented no less than eighty-­ five instances where members of the Wehrmacht refused to kill Jews.17 Some refused to kill on religious grounds, and others argued that they were not sent into the battlefield to kill Jewish civilians. Lewy writes, “A member of the auxiliary unit told his superior, ‘I did not come to Russia to shoot women and children. I myself have a wife and children at home.’ The officer did not insist on his participation in the shootings.” The importance of these refusals should not be underestimated. Perpetrators had the ability to refuse to kill. In many instances no significant consequences followed for those who did refuse to kill. Individuals might be

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reprimanded or posted to a different assignment, but in the cases reported those who refused to kill were not themselves murdered in retaliation. Peer pressure did create an undeniable influence upon the bulk of the troops and police officers, but once an individual killed resistance to killing became more difficult.18 Neither peer pressure nor superior orders were metaphysical excuses. They failed to excuse the immorality of the perpetrators.

Historical Convergences and Logical Intersections To explain how mass murder in the Holocaust was possible, historians may point to a convergence of events and forces. One could include in this long list events such as a worldwide economic depression, longstanding regional antisemitism, lingering ill will regarding the terms of surrender offered to Germany after World War I, and the political manipulations that allowed Hitler to come to power. These events and sociological forces along with many others seem to the author to be incontrovertible as contributing historical conditions for the Holocaust. So many are the contributing historical conditions that one can overlook the underlying Nazis logic that dehumanized Jews and others. Nazis assumed a basic logical relationship existed between three classes of actors—Germans, Aryans, and citizens of a sovereign state. These relations are identified in the following three premises. (P1) All Aryans are individuals who have the right to life in virtue of their race. (All A are R). (P2) Not all German citizens are Aryans. (Not all Gc are A.) (P3) All German citizens are citizens of a sovereign state whose rights are stipulated by the state. (All Gc are Sc*) Premise 1 is an assertion of Nazi racism. In combination with Premise 2 it supports Aryans’ right to life, but it makes no presumption about the rights of non-Aryans. Premise 3 was required, if the non-Aryans were to be denied their rights. Premise 1 states: All Aryans are individuals who have a right to life in virtue of their race. The premise is unsound unless one believes in Aryan supremacy. One can find in the Nuremberg laws and Nazi’s policies an implicit racism that favored Aryans. The Nazis openly and unapologetically asserted that the Aryans were racially superior. Heinrich Himmler’s

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mission as head of the Ahnenerbe was the production of evidence that the myths of prehistory about a race of super-people were grounded in fact. While Nazi leaders strongly desired to provide scientific evidence of the superiority of Aryans, their crude attempts to collect skeletons, runes, and other data only confirmed that no such evidence was forthcoming.19 Those who were convinced of the racial superiority of Aryans were prepared to assert that they had a right to life. The premise is unsound and appears to be the product of circular reasoning. Aryans have been a superior race, since they merit the right to life; and Aryans merit the right to life, since they have been and continue to be a superior race. Nazis busily engaged in the self-authentication of their superiority in defense of this premise. Premise 2 states: Not all Germans are Aryans. Of course, this is a negation of a universal premise. From it follows two particular premises: Some German are Aryans; Some Germans are not Aryans. A Venn Diagram of this premise would show Germans and Aryans as two circles, and the intersecting region would designate those who were both Germans and Aryans. In their defense of the racial superiority of Aryans the Nazis were willing to concede that the Aryan race included individuals other than Germans. These individuals merited the right to life in virtue of their race. Absolute superiority of one race implied that others demonstrated a relative inferiority. The rights and privileges of other races would depend on their racial proximity to the Aryan race. Those more like Aryans merited greater rights, and those less like Aryans merited fewer rights or no rights whatsoever. At the lowest end of the spectrum of races the Nazis placed the Jews. Premise 3 states: All German citizens are citizens of a sovereign state whose rights are stipulated by the state. The theories of a hierarchy of races and the associated rights and privileges of racial superiority would have remained a fiction without some practical application in the social and political arena. This was made available through a fascist state. Though Premise 1 is unsound, it upheld the rights of Aryans only. A practical entailment of Premise 3 was the disempowerment and oppression of non-­ Aryans. Claudia Koontz said, “underlying the Nazi conscience [was the assumption that] upheld the right of a government to annul the legal protections of assimilated citizens on the basis of what the government defined as their ethnicity.”20 Germany was a fascist state. In its practical operations Nazi Germany acted as a sovereign state that relied on a realpolitik viewpoint for its authority. In other words, Germany asserted its authority over its citizens

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and related itself to other nations as a sovereign state and not a kingdom, a communist state, or a democracy. Hence, it did not answer to a king, a social contract, or a higher authority such as natural law. As a sovereign state Germany was its own authority. Assuming that Germany saw itself as a having the realpolitik authority of a sovereign state, Germany could act as any sovereign state could act. Sovereign states could forego an appeal to a higher authority to determine how it related itself to its citizens. It could stipulate what rights and privileges its citizens enjoyed. If the sovereign state stipulated that a particular race was recognizable as racially superior, then members of the race could reciprocate by recognizing the absolute authority of the sovereignty of the state. Here we see a circularity of reasoning again. A person, X, is granted a right by agency Y, providing that X acknowledges the authority of Y to grant the right. As a sovereign state Germany recognized and affirmed Aryans’ privileged right to life, and the Nazis willing accepted the authority of Germany to do so.

License to Kill Perpetrators of genocide proceed as if they were granted a broad-based license to kill persons of a specific ethnic group. Why did Nazis believe that they had a license to kill Jews? The prevalence of antisemitism provided only a predisposition to resent Jews with the outcome that they were often treated unfairly. A catalyst to violence and a warrant to justify violence were needed to initiate the campaigns of murder. Preceding Kristallnacht the catalyst was provided by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew. The justification was supplied by the realpolitik sovereignty of the state and the beliefs about maintenance of the purity of the race. The ancestral protocol and the realpolitik sovereignty of the German state were dominate factors that combined to support perpetrators in killing their victims. In combination they could act as if the privileged right to life of Aryans was an exclusive right. The right to life was supposed to belonged to some and not others, and it was supposed that the shortage of goods and services warranted that others such as Jews and Roma could be deprived of this right. The realpolitik view of the sovereignty of the state makes no appeal to higher principles such as an international declaration of human rights. It exercises authority to stipulate the rights of its own citizens. Its citizens

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have the right to privacy or the right to retain ownership of real estate to the extent that the state allows. It is within the power of a sovereign state to stipulate that some rights are retained by some of its citizens and not others. Furthermore, it stipulates how it shall relate itself to the rights of individuals who are not citizens of its state. From this power it follows that a sovereign state may abruptly deny citizenship to some individuals living within its borders. Those individuals can become stateless people. State sovereignty qualifies the right to have rights. The Nuremberg laws contained an affirmation of the rights of Aryans and a denial of the rights of non-Aryans. With these laws the Nazis tested how the German population would embrace their exercise of state sovereignty. By law non-Aryans such as Jews could no longer serve in the military. The right to intermarry with Aryans was denied to non-Aryans like Jews. Rights to ownership of property and businesses were severely limited. With further legislation these rights would be completely denied to non-Aryans. The denial of rights of non-Aryans escalated after the passage of the Nuremberg laws. Confinement to ghettos deprived subjects of their right to freedom of movement. Eventually Jews were denied the right to consent regarding health and well-being. The Jews were competent to refuse to serve as subjects of medical experimentation, but their ability to offer consent was unrecognized. The denial of these basic rights seems egregious, but it still does not seem to justify the denial to a right to life. Implicit in the marriage laws and laws governing sexual relations of non-Aryans with Aryans as well as the ancestral protocol was the belief that Jews could contaminate the purity of the Aryan race. Denying the right of Jews to live was regarded as a defense of the right of Aryans to maintain the purity of their race. Those who were racially distinct could not live in harmony with Aryans since their consumption of scarce resources was thought to pose a threat to the wellbeing and largess of Aryans. Likewise, those who were racially distinct could not intermingle with Aryans since they posed a threat to the purity of the race. This ideological commitment allowed Nazis and soldiers to conceptualize non-Aryans as enemies of the state. If you were a Jew or Roma, you were deemed an enemy of the state even if you did not don a uniform. Noncombatants and innocents such as children became enemies of the state.

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Conclusion This chapter investigates how Aryans came to see themselves as entitled to the right to life and how others were perceived to be a threat to their right to life. Antisemitism was not a newly emerging force in Germany under the Nazi regime. Jews had suffered from pogroms in previous decades. What was novel was the organized devotion to the purity of the Aryan race coupled with the realpolitik sovereignty of the German state. Under the Nazi influence the German state began systematically to eliminate the rights of Jews. Eventually Jews would be forced to act as subjects in life-­ threatening experiments, and they would be denied their right to life. In the values and behavior of a realpolitik state one can identify an expression of virtuous or vicious sovereignty. These values and behaviors are evident in state law, state policy, and the enforcement of such. How realpolitik states act out their sovereignty is the occasion for virtue or vice. It can be the case that a realpolitik state manifests care in its dealings with its people and others like refugees, or a realpolitik state can manifest insensitivity or cruelty in its dealings with its people and others. Under the Nazis, Germany asserted a callousness and cruelty toward non-Aryans. In addition, it did so with a sense of mistaken pride, hubris. The collective of the German state under the Nazis was responsible for its cultivation of the vices of callousness, cruelty, and extraordinary pride. Scholars’ investigation the Holocaust may point to numerous historical factors as causes of the Holocaust. The combined influence of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Hess was a powerful force within German society. Likewise, the way killers responded to superior orders to kill suggests they were conditioned to see killing as another day’s work. These excuses draw attention away from the responsibility for the decision to kill noncombatants. The majority of victims were not killed by weapons of mass destruction. They were killed by other persons acting under the false belief that these noncombatants were enemies. In retrospect the Nazis’ seizure of race-based privileges represents an abuse of their moral luck. That many Germans were Aryans rather than Jews or Roma was a matter of mere finitude. That mere finitude did come with advantages and disadvantages, but the Nazis abused the advantages. First, the Nazis failed to recognize their moral luck as such. Second, the Nazis attributed a false value to their moral luck. Third, the Nazis leveraged their moral luck to the disadvantage of others. The Nazis approached their mere finitude as if it could not have been otherwise. In so acting they

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failed to recognize the non-necessity their moral luck. They failed to draw the proper conclusion from their inability to produce evidence of the origins of a distinct race of Aryans. What followed was a false valuation of the Germans’ moral luck to be Aryans. Were Aryans stronger? Were Aryans braver? Were Aryans more intelligent? Nazis believed it was so. Nonetheless, the basis of that value was neither self-evident nor demonstrable. Having claimed that their moral luck had extraordinary value, the Nazis leveraged the claim to entitle themselves as Aryans to rights and privileges that they would deny to others. From a moral point of view the driving forces that allowed individuals to kill citizens in their own country are common and can readily be duplicated. Racism and the hatred that accompanies it are not unique to one decade nor to one group of people. Any state could adopt the realpolitik view that it is the final authority in determining the rights of its citizens. States can reject universal human rights grounded in common sense realism or reject human rights grounded in a principle such as natural law. When applying a realpolitik view of human rights, states can stipulate who has basic rights and who does not. If human rights are not grounded in principle, then any human right is not exempt from becoming circumscribed or denied by the state. Even the right to life can become a right that the state grants to some and denies to others. In retrospect the Nazis followed a national path that led to the deaths of six million Jews along with many more. The Nuremberg laws presented the German people with a test of their willingness to tolerate the mistreatment of some by the deprivation of their legal rights. Having shown their tolerance for this type of legislation that denied the rights of others, the Nazis proceeded to reduce the rights of Jews, Roma, and others until they were denied all rights. The T-4 campaign tested the willingness of the German people to accept the murder or sterilization of German people deemed to be defective. That campaign was brought to a halt, when it was evident that familial loyalty to the disabled was a stronger force than loyalty to the state. The T-4 campaign was halted but not before it provided valuable information on the means of automating mass murder by asphyxiation. Nazis learned not to jeopardize their national standing by the mistreatment of the disabled, and Nazis learned more efficient means of carrying out mass murders. Without this progression of events Nazis could not have had the practical knowledge required to kill a thousand persons a day in Auschwitz in the summer of 1943. The Nazis’ mass murders were

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a practical expression of a sophisticated form of racial bias. That bias in the environment of a fascist state granted them a license to kill. Racial bias is both extraordinary and ordinary. It is extraordinary in the sense that it favors some to the exclusion of others. It is ordinary in the sense that ethnic groups can choose to assert their supposed superiority if given the opportunity. It is a show of force. Love of their privileged race was a deciding factor in the Nazis pathway to genocide. Nonetheless, it required that individuals make the decision to believe the myth, and it required individuals to act intentionally upon orders to kill non-combatants.

Notes 1. Stanton, http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-­2/8-­stages-­of-­genocide/ 2. Genesis 4: 1–26. 3. I Kings 21. 4. Claudia Koontz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belnap Press, 2003), 331, note 2. Koontz says, “Among the ‘situationalists,’ four stand out: Hans Buchheim, Hans Mommsen, Richard Rhodes, and Christopher Browning. And among those who posit the existence of a uniquely German racism, Paul Rose, John Weiss, and Daniel J. Goldhagen have written most forcefully in recent years.” 5. Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends. 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 194. 6. For a discussion of moral luck see Daniel Statman, Moral Luck (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). An objector may claim that a theist would reject the notion that the Nazis were the product of moral luck. I, the author, acknowledge myself as a theist who embraces the Christian faith. As a theist I suppose happenstance and temporality are the outcome of divine creativity. However, I do not suppose this alters one’s mere finitude. One must be born at a specific time and place. Associated with that time and place are several systemic advantages or disadvantages that may count as one’s moral luck. I do not suppose belief in theism changes one’s moral luck. Furthermore, the theist and the non-theist may hold an individual accountable for how he or she values and acts upon that moral luck. For example, in the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10: 30–37) it was the good Samaritan’s moral luck that he was born a Samaritan and not a Jew and had the opportunity to develop his talents and wealth as he did. Within the scope of his moral responsibility lay the possibilities of aiding the man who was robbed, ignoring the man who was robbed, or further abusing the man who was robbed. His choice to aid the man was not

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the Samaritan’s moral luck, but it was his exercise of his moral responsibility for doing good. 7. Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof (Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007), 94. 8. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 94. 9. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 62. 10. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 106. 11. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 111. 12. Koontz, The Nazi Conscience,105. 13. Vivien Spritz, Doctors from Hell (Boulder, Colorado: Sentient Publications, 2005), 237. 14. Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 237. 15. Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 201. 16. Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 203. 17. Guenter Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 79. 18. Lewy, Perpetrators, 79. 19. Pringle, The Master Plan, 240. 20. Koontz, The Nazi Conscience, 8.

CHAPTER 6

The Case of the Aryan Jesus Dogma: Enlarging Entitlement through Propaganda

Introduction In a national effort to promote antisemitism, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence (ISEJI) was established in Nazi Germany. Its leader, Walter Grundmann, was instrumental in the promotion of the Aryan Jesus dogma in scholarly circles. Through a quid pro quo arrangement with a state-based university the dogma was given an air of scholarly respectability. The dogma asserted that Jesus was not a Jew. This dogma was adopted into the German Lutheran Church’s catechism of the time. This adoption ensured that the dogma would become part of the belief system of youth undergoing catechism. Not only was the motivation for the dogma suspect, but the reasoning used to arrive at the conclusion was faulty. The dogma contributed to the body of Nazi propaganda that vilified Jews as enemies of the Aryan society.

An early version of this chapter appeared as the article authored by me, “The Case of the Aryan Jesus Dogma: Enlarging Entitlement Through Propaganda.” Philosophy Study 9 (3, 2019): 134–143. https://doi. org/10.17265/2159-­5313/2019.03.002

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_6

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As we noted earlier antisemitism was widespread in Germany and Europe for many years before the twentieth century. Likewise, two conflicting beliefs were widely held among Christians. First, there was the belief in deicide, that is, the belief that Jews killed God when they killed Jesus. Second, there was the belief that Jesus was a Jew. The first belief fed the ancient animosity of the public toward Jews. The second belief seemed to undermine the first, since the founder of the Christian religion was a Jew. It was supposed that if the founder of the Christian religion was a Jew, then Christianity owed a debt of thanks to Judaism for giving the world Jesus. What the Nazis needed was a way to channel the energy of hatred within the first belief and a way to cancel the devotion evoked by the second belief. If this could be achieved, then the general population would have one less reason to see the mistreatment of Jews as wrong. To achieve this objective Nazis needed to appeal to the imagination of the population. Using their ability to fund and direct academics, the Nazis found a way to retain the first belief and cancel the second. To cancel the second belief, they would need to rewrite the history and theology that was received by the general population. Without apology, the Nazis deployed a subtle, subliminal message borrowed from some German theologians: Jesus was no Jew; Jesus was an Aryan. Throughout this study, the claim—Jesus was an Aryan—and the carefully crafted story that supported it shall be called the Aryan Jesus dogma. This Aryan Jesus dogma became part of the desensitization happening in Stanton’s second and third stages of genocide—symbolization and discrimination. To ignore the power of the dogma to influence the action of German soldiers and the public during the Holocaust would be an oversight. This author supposes the dogma functioned as one of a series of sufficient causes to entice German police or citizens to murder innocent Jews without remorse. In other words, the Aryan Jesus dogma proved to be causally efficacious in the decision of individuals to kill or not kill Jews. This chapter focuses on why and how the dogma was developed. The dogma was an important part of the propaganda the Nazis would use. Upper ranking Nazis officials were fully committed to a racist ideology that would justify the mistreatment and killing of Jews. Many soldiers and German citizens already internalized the antisemitism prevalent in twentieth-century Europe when the Nazis ruled. Even Hitler made a veiled appeal to ancient animosities against the Jews, when he claimed that the Jews were responsible for the loss of World War I and the depression. Great masses of Germans accepted his views uncritically. The Nazi leaders

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were intent on the transformation of soldiers and German citizens into Jew killers as they developed a final solution. In spite of the prevailing antisemitism, individuals were not predisposed to mistreat Jews without reason. Greater incentives would be required to motivate Germans to disrespect the basic dignity of another human and to take that person’s life. While Germany’s state supported churches could have provided the last line of defense in maintaining a civil society, the majority of German churches were supportive of the Nazification of the state. Traditionally Christians were taught that the Christ whom they worshiped was a Jew, and this tradition could have provided at least one additional reason to respect the dignity of Jews as fellow humans. In the preceding chapter I have discussed how vast numbers of victims in the Holocaust were killed at close range by bullet fire or bludgeoning. Soldiers, police, and civilians pulled the trigger to kill the Jews who would fill mass graves. Christopher Browning’s work, Ordinary Men, chronicles the reports of men who were reluctant to make their first kill of Jews. Yes, they did so under peer pressure. In this social environment the Aryan Jesus dogma removed a reason to respect Jews, while it reinforced the racial divide between Germans and Jews. Consequently, German citizens had one less reason to refrain from violence as a means to resolve ancient animosities against the Jews. The German theologians who came to the defense of the notion that Jesus was an Aryan served the Nazis well. The story of the Aryan Jesus Dogma is a two-sided story. It is the story of the creation of an objective dogma that becomes part of the Nazi narrative about Aryan supremacy. It is also the story of the complicity of professors and of the academy in a propaganda campaign that masqueraded as scholarship.

The Religious Appeal of an Aryan Jesus Religion is a powerful tool for any political entity to use to ground its ideology. When the NSDAP, that is, the Nazis first came to dominate German politics the party both needed and sought a religious foundation to add credibility to its plans. Although some scholars had contributed to the Aryan Jesus dogma prior to 1933, it was not articulated as a complete doctrine by the time the NSDAP had come to dominate German politics. It would require additional scholarly work to shape the dogma into a serviceable form. So, one may wonder why the Nazis did not turn to a readily available religion to ground their agenda. The appeal to a German pagan

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myth would have been consistent with their ideology, but that indigenous religion had not already captured the religious imagination of the masses. The dominant religion that did capture the religious imagination of the masses in the early twentieth century in Germany was Christianity. In our discussion of racism, we saw how the founder of the Lutheran church in preceding centuries had condoned violent behavior toward Jews. Luther’s vitriol toward Jews would be useful for the Nazis. The Nazis could have called upon Germany’s pagan myths to validate the antisemitism of their ideology. Some paganists were prepared to promote it as the state religion of choice. Erich Ludendorf was reputed to be the first paganist in the Nazi movement. Ironically Ludendorf was the only paganist expelled from the Nazi party.1 The composer Richard Wagner identified Christ with the pagan deity Wotan.2 One of Hitler’s leading officers, Heinrich Himmler was a paganist. The most outspoken paganist in the Nazi party was Alfred Rosenberg, but his influence upon German society was minimal. For the most part Germany in the twentieth century ignored its ties to paganism and identified itself as a Christian nation. In 1933 about 97% of Germans were reported to be Christians. While a considerable part of that population were Catholics, the majority of Germany’s Christians proudly identified themselves with the protestant religion of the famed reformer Martin Luther. It is not surprising that Germans in the twentieth century would flout Luther’s antisemitism as a defense of their own antisemitism. Nazis need a way to manipulate to their advantage the ancient animosities within German society toward Jews. Nazis rightly supposed that if they were to leverage religious fervor against the Jews, they needed to do so through Christianity and the German Lutheran church. In 1933 the majority of Germany’s citizens may have been viewed nominally as Christians, but they were by no means united in their beliefs. Among those calling themselves Christians were Roman Catholics and numerous Protestants. Given their allegiance to the order of the Catholic Church, Catholics’ loyalty to Hitler and the Nazis would remain in question. The remaining Protestant population became sharply divided when pastors and churchgoers began to question the direction of the Nazis. In the Protestant population, the German Christian movement, that is, the DS Church consisted of about 600,000 persons who supported the Nazis. They agreed with the terms of the “Aryan paragraph.” The so-called Aryan paragraph was a state supported policy intended to remove from service pastors who were not full-blooded Aryans, that is, pastors who had

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Jewish ancestors. In the eyes of the Nazis conversion to Christianity in no way changed a person’s ancestry. Jewish blood was more reliable than Christian conversion in determining the racial standing of a person in the Nazis’ view. The Confessing Church was comprised of a much smaller segment of Germans who identified themselves as Christians. Two notable persons in their ranks included Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Members of the Confessing Church did not present a united front in opposing the antisemitic policies in the Aryan paragraph. Some opposed the practices demanded by the Aryan paragraph, while others were willing to enforce the prohibition against the service of pastors with Jewish ancestry. A few even agreed with the Nazis that all sacraments of the church should be withheld from Jews. During the early years of his ascendency to power, Hitler presented himself as a Christian. This common religious ground provided another way that the people of Germany could identify with their leader. Heinrich Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s inner circle and was a paganist. While Hitler trusted Himmler as head of the police division, he rejected Himmler’s paganism calling it a “chimera.” In a 1937 entry in his diary Joseph Goebbels reported that Hitler found in Christ his inspiration to fight the Jews.3 Of course, Hitler’s inspiration was an imagined Aryan Jesus who was a strong spirited person of Aryan blood whose enemies were the Jews. Hitler failed to see that the Jesus of Nazareth in the gospels posed a moral threat not only to the Jewish elite of the first century but also to the occupying Roman authorities.

The Theological Support of an Aryan Jesus To say that the Nazi war on Jews was a war on all fronts is an understatement. So committed to antisemitic policies and procedures were the Nazis that they sanctioned the opening of “The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence” (ISEJI) on May 6, 1939. Located in Eisenach it was a short eighty-seven miles away from the University of Jena. Ever prepared to seize upon the symbolism of the moment the opening was held at Wartburg Castle in the place where Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses against Catholicism. The event was well attended by Protestant pastors, theologians, and churchgoers. By establishing the institute, the Nazis were taking one more step to wage ideological warfare against its religious enemy, Judaism. Walter Grundmann was appointed to

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serve as the head of the ISEJI, and he held a faculty appointment at the University of Jena. Suzzanna Heschel observed that the University of Jena acted as an academic clearinghouse for members of the ISEJI.  The university had the ability to confer terminal degrees upon members of the ISEJI. The ISEJI could reciprocate by providing students a place to display their scholarly work at conferences and through publications. Heschel said, “Several members of the Institute were able to receive doctorates at Jena, and the Institute offered significant assistance by publishing many of the dissertations by Jena students and offering them an opportunity to present their research at Institute conferences.”4 In hindsight these quid pro quo arrangements appear to make a mockery of academic scholarship, but at the time these arrangements allowed theologians to validate the dogma under investigation. Graduate students studying for their terminal degree know the horror stories of peers whose dissertations were rejected. At the University Jena the deciding factor in gaining approval for a dissertation was often the willingness of the candidate to validate conclusions consistent with National Socialism. In other words, dissertation committee members were overtly seeking to validate antisemitism. Thus, the institute along with the theological school became a self-affirming propaganda machine. Working together they could produce propaganda that would align with the Nazi media campaign against the Jews. Candidates for terminal degrees were expected to demonstrate more than an affiliation with the NSDAP. They were expected to arrive at conclusions that were decidedly antisemitic. Eberhard Zetzel’s dissertation was rejected for its failure to conclude that Judaism was spiritually unproductive. The committee rejected Wilhelm Richert’s dissertation even after it was rewritten to respond to recommendations. Speaking of Richert’s revised dissertation Professor Wolf Meyer-­ Erlach said, “The theologian lacks the necessary understanding of National Socialism, that the racial question is the foundational question for everything…” 5 Through its antisemitic publications the ISEJI aimed at both the dejudaization of Christianity and its Nazification. An example of its dejudaization efforts was the removal approximately 350 hymns from the traditional German hymnal. The hymns were deemed unsuitable for worship due to their references to the Old Testament.6 At the direction of the institute hymns were removed from church hymnals or rewritten, biblical texts were subjected to critical revision, and the message of the catechism of the

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church was rewritten. Grundemann would later produce a life of Christ that was acceptable to the party. Gerhard Kittle was one of several prominent German theologians active at this time. One of his most notable editorial works was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Despite his prominence as a theologian, Kittle had to stand trial after the war for crimes against humanity. Some Jews testified in his defense that they had benefited from his kindly assistance. Their testimony could not obliterate an obvious change in Kittel’s writings and speeches about Jews after 1933. Before the Nazis came to power Kittle allowed for the likelihood that non-Semitic blood could be found in Jesus’ ancestry. In a 1926 publication Kittle said, “It is conceivable that Jesus, if he was Galilean, had a couple of drops of non-Jewish blood in his veins.”7 Kittle’s seemingly benign antisemitism was transformed into a vitriolic antisemitism, when he discussed how Jews should be treated. The post-war trial examined not only his theological writing but also his public speeches and writings. Like prominent theologians and charismatic pastors Kittle could effectively appeal to the general public. In his 1933 speech, “De Judenfrage,” Kittle spoke openly of the Jewish problem. He supposed there were only four possible solutions to the Jewish problem. They were: (1) extermination; (2) Zionism; (3) assimilation; or (4) guest status.8 Kittle rejected extermination on practical grounds but not in spirit. He pointed out that previous attempts to exterminate a population had not been successful. Kittel’s description of the Jewish problem epitomizes an underlying transformation of values. Though he regarded extermination as a solution unlikely to succeed, the fact remains that Kittle supposed extermination to be a live option to solve the alleged problem. Inclusion in the list is more than an indication of his deep-seated antisemitism. It is an affirmation of Kittle’s commitment to the Nazi’s view of superiority of the Aryan race. The problem supposes that preservation of the Aryan race has intrinsic value, while Jewish lives have negative instrumental value. Hence, the presence of Jews in Germany was presumed to be a threat to the preservation of a pure Aryan race.

An Aryan Jesus Creed Reconstructed In retrospect, the Aryan Jesus dogma was constructed piecemeal, and religious and political leaders would have communicated it piecemeal to the public. Individuals familiar with the workings of scholarship understand

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that conclusions may emerge intermittently and can result in the retracing of previous steps and thoughts. Meanwhile the general public may seize upon a single point of the debate as confirmation of their sympathies, and they may embrace that idea whether the final word in scholarship on the topic has been offered or if not. Meanwhile the Aryan Jesus Dogma was woven into the fabric of the German church through a considerable revision of its catechism, its hymnody, its theology, and its sacred texts. Those who dared to preach the doctrine were mouthing the sympathies of the Nazis. Scholars and theologians at the institute would develop a piece of the theory, present it to their peers, and await the approval thereof. For instance, in 1908, Paul Haupt, a professor at Johns Hopkins University argued in print that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem of Judea. Members of the ISEJI assimilated this claim along with others to disassociate Jesus from Judaism. As late as 1939 other theologians were still perfecting the argument that Jesus was not Jewish. The utility of the proposal for eliminating Jesus’ ties to Judaism was tremendous. Once that hypothesis was accepted as dogma, it would then be disseminated as widely as possible through print and media to reach the general population. Pastors affiliated with the institute could resort to the pulpit to disseminate antisemitic ideas developed in the institute. Individuals already harboring antisemitic sympathies would receive without question the prejudicial pronouncements of state sanctioned theologians. The institute embraced its mission to de-Judaize Christianly. Its leaders rejected the Old Testament, and they aimed to produce a New Testament free of Jewish references and associations. Grundmann contributed a life of Christ that portrayed Jesus as an Aryan. Leaders of the institute sought to produce a hymnal that was free of references to Judaism. The institute’s leaders even prescribed how and when Aryans were to pray. By the year 1933 the endorsement of the Aryan Jesus view was sufficiently advanced so that it could be introduced as part of the catechism of the state church.9 That is to say, in the 1933 catechism of the German DS church initiates were taught that Jesus was not Jewish, but Jesus was Aryan. 10 Within the span of a few years catechized members of the German DS church accepted without question the dogma that Jesus was Aryan. By the end of the war the ISEJI was dismantled, and the denazification of the German society and church had begun, but by then scholars had already disseminated the Aryan Jesus dogma. If the process of Nazifying the church had continued uninterrupted after 1945, one may imagine that

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the German church would have developed a creed to affirm the Aryan Jesus dogma. What follows is an imaginary creed incorporating some of the elements that German theologians were asserting: I believe in Jesus, born of a Gentile father in the northern capital of Bethlehem. I believe Jesus was a true prophet sent from God. I believe Jesus called himself the Son of Man in solidarity with all true Aryans. I believe Jesus’ worst enemies were the Jews. I believe that Jesus came to bring a sword upon the earth to destroy the Jews in demonstration of his manly spirit. I believe Jesus’ betrayer was a Jew from Jerusalem named Judas. I believe jealousy drove the Jews to kill Jesus.

This imaginary creed brings together no less than seven assertions German theologians were prepared to make in support of the Aryan Jesus dogma. The ISEJI and the faculty of the University of Jena embraced the antisemitic assertions made prior to 1933 and added their own support to further the dogma. The imagined creed represents the following assertions of the theologians: (1) Jesus’ gentile parentage; (2) Jesus’ birth in gentile territory; (3) Jesus’ opposition by Jews; (4) Jesus’ refusal to assume the title of Jewish Messiah; (5) Jesus’ strong and manly opposition to Jews; (6) the Jews’ jealousy of Jesus; (7) Jesus’ betrayal and murder by Jews. German theologians were prepared to defend each assertion to make their point in support of Nazi antisemitism. First, it was asserted that Jesus was born of gentile parentage. In 1896 the German Biblical scholar Ernest Renan published a Life of Christ. Renan said, “Jesus sprang from the ranks of the people. His father Joseph and his mother Mary were of humble station, living by their toil, workpeople in that condition so common in the East…”11 In this passage, Renan does not definitively identify Jesus’ parents as gentiles, though he does say, “The population of Galilee, as the name itself indicates, was mixed.” Renan openly admitted he aimed to eliminate the miraculous element from the account of Jesus’ life. The assertion that Renan and other scholars made was that many persons repatriating Galilee in the Second Temple period were gentiles. Others suggested that Jesus was fathered by a Roman. If one assumes that many persons repatriating Galilee were gentiles, one could infer only that some were gentiles and others were not. It does not follow that Jesus was the offspring of gentile parentage. Only if one were willing to say all persons born in Galilee were persons of Aryan

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blood would the conclusion follow, but that would commit the informal fallacy of composition. Second, it was asserted that Jesus was either born in Nazareth or that he was not born in Bethlehem of Judea. Renan asserted that Jesus was born in Nazareth, and he claimed the tradition of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem arises from a corruption of an Old Testament text. In 1908 Paul Haupt of Johns Hopkins University attempted to explain away the Bethlehem tradition with a novel suggestion. He argued that there was a second Bethlehem that served as the capital of the province of Galilee. The explanations of Renan and Haupt both appear to be conjectures, given the textual evidence of Luke’s birth account and supporting texts to the contrary. Third, it was asserted that Jesus’ enemies were the Jews. The Gospel of John includes several dialogues Jesus had with Jewish leaders. In John 8:44 Jesus replies to the Jews in Jerusalem who are touting their Abrahamic descent. To them Jesus said, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning…” In Hitler’s thinking this quotable line provided evidence that the Jews were sub-human. That Jesus had enemies and that many of them were Jews is undeniable. However, this assertion makes use of the same fallacious reasoning as the first assertion. Some Pharisees were Jesus’ enemies, some Sadducees were Jesus enemies, and the high priests proved to be enemies of Jesus. Having demonstrated that part of the Jewish race were enemies of Jesus, one cannot conclude the entire race of Jews were enemies of Jesus. Jewish women contributed financial support to the ministry of Jesus. The household of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were friends of Jesus. The Jewish ruler Nicodemus was a supporter of Jesus. One must indulge in a fallacy of composition to arrive at the Nazis’ conclusion. From finding that some enemies of Jesus were members of Jewish race it does not follow that all members of the Jewish race were his enemies. Fourth, it was asserted that Jesus took up the title of Son of Man to avoid identification as the Jewish Messiah. Honorific titles for Jesus were not problematic for Nazis, if the titles did not infer that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. The Gospel of Mark most frequently used the title, the Son of Man, to identify Jesus. When Jesus uses the title in Mark 8: 38 or Mark 13:26, it is used as an oblique self-reference. In both instances the title is used in describing apocalyptic events, and the title has Messianic connotations traceable to the book of Daniel. The textual evidence clearly favors the messianic connection. Renan readily acknowledged the connection. He said, “The application made of [the Son of Man] by Jesus to

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himself, accordingly, proclaims his messiahship (173).12 To disassociate Jesus’ self-reference with a Messiah, the scholar Paul Haupt resorted to an appeal to authority that aims to ignore the textual evidence. Haupt said. Wellhausen says he agrees with Eerdmans, of Leyden, and Lietzmann of Jena, in denying that Jesus called himself the Son of Man. This does not mean that Jesus did not use the phrase for the pronoun of the first person, but that He did not employ the term to designate Himself as the Messiah (133).

Fifth, it was asserted that Jesus offered a strong and manly opposition to the Jews. It was Jesus’ manly strength that appealed to Hitler. Yes, Jesus fought Jews. Here the problem of quantification appears again. Jesus fought Jews. Did he fight some Jews? Yes. Did he fight many Jews? Perhaps. He did fight numerous leaders of the organized religion of his day. Yes. Did he fight all Jews? No. His own disciples included Jews from both Judea and Galilee. Masses who flocked to him were Jews. Sixth, it was asserted that Jesus’ betrayer was Judas, a Jew from Jerusalem. Tradition does indicate that Judas was from Judea, while the majority of the disciples were from Galilee. However, the ethnicity of the remaining disciples was not Aryan. Peter was a dedicated Jew whose commitment to ceremonial laws proved to be an obstacle in the life of the early church. Another disciple, Simon the Zealot was a member of the radical Zionist faction of Jesus’ time. In addition, the disciple John seems to have had family ties with the high priest. Jesus did have an enemy in Judas, but he was not the only enemy Jesus had. Judas was not the only disciple of Jesus who was a Jew. The remaining eleven disciples were Jews. Seventh, it was asserted that Jews killed Jesus. In antisemitic rants this became the basis of an ancient animosity. Jewish leaders met in the night to prepare Jesus’ prosecution. They could not legally convene a trial until sunrise, and then their ritual observations of the Passover hampered their proceedings. After the Jewish court condemned Jesus, they appealed to Pilate to have Jesus executed. It was undeniable that Jews were complicitous in the death of Jesus and that they had pronounced a death sentence upon Jesus. However, it was the Roman guard that crucified Jesus. To assert that Jews killed Jesus is to overlook the fact that the executioners of Jesus’ death sentence were Roman soldiers who were under the command of Pilate.

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The imaginary Aryan Jesus creed brings together many of the assertions and innuendos that Nazis made about Jesus of Nazareth. The imaginary creed unites the piecemeal assertions that Nazis did defend in support of the dogma. Those who defended the dogma made full use of the aura of respectable scholarship. However, the cloak of scholarship cannot overcome the lack of textual support, or the faulty reasoning used to defend the dogma. We may conclude Jesus was no Aryan. The imaginary creed and the dogma aim to establish that Jesus was not a Jew. What is largely unstated is that the thinly veiled argument was intended to break down the sympathy of individuals toward Jews. That argument may now be stated as follows: If Jesus was a Jew, then Jews deserve the respect that other persons receive. Jesus was not a Jew. Therefore, Jews do not deserve to receive the respect shown to other persons.

The Efficacy and Logic of the Case for an Aryan Jesus It would be a gross misstatement to suppose that the dogma made individuals killers. The more modest claim is that the dogma had some causal efficacy in shaping the moral imagination of the German population. Germans whose biases were confirmed by their religion were less hesitant to approve the killing of Jews. The dogma is presented as only one of a series of sufficient and non-necessary conditions that would lead German citizens and others to murder Jews. Academics in the ISEJI knew that Lutherans, Catholics, and others revered the person of Jesus. What they aimed to achieve was the disassociation of Jesus with Judaism, and under the guise of scholarship they argued for the Aryanization of Jesus. If theologians and pastors had not endorsed the Jesus dogma, perhaps some members of the German population would have hesitated to disregard the rights of Jews or to kill Jews. To recognize the efficacy of the dogma is not to suggest that the dogma itself is credible. Within the thinly veiled argument that would justify the mistreatment of Jews, the dogma functions as a premise. With its reliance on an unsound premise to support an invalid argument form the argument proves to be doubly flawed. The underlying argument makes use of the fallacious form of a denial of the antecedent: If P, then Q; not P, therefore not Q. It may now be restated:

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If Jesus is a Jew, then Jews deserve to be treated with dignity. Jesus was an Aryan. Therefore, Jews do not deserve to be treated with respect. First, the thinly veiled argument for the dogma fails, since it asserts an unsound premise that is the product of circular reasoning, namely, that Jesus was an Aryan. Our examination of the dogma revealed that it was the product of ideology and circular reasoning rather than sound scholarship. Theologians declared that Jesus was not a Jew, since theologians asserted that Jesus was Aryan. Second, the thinly veiled argument for the dogma fails since it is an argument to deny the antecedent. Students of logic recognized this as a fallacious argument form. To arrive at the desired conclusion by means of the thinly veiled argument, scholars would have to deny the antecedent. Not only does the argument invoke an unsound premise, but it also uses an invalid argument form. One of the most changeable general moral principles of action is that of truth telling: One ought to tell the truth. To construct the case for the Aryan Jesus scholars abandoned their commitment to truth telling. Instead, they created parts of a case that would make plausible the notion that Jesus was not a Jew. Disseminating that information was one more step in desensitizing the general public to the mistreatment and killing of Jews. Already the propaganda of the state was shaping the moral imagination. This state supported religious dogma was consistent with the antisemitic rhetoric that was being disseminated. The practical outcome of Nazi antisemitism was the transformation of the normative ethical command: Thou shalt not kill. Nazis came to believe killing Jews was both permissible and obligatory. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it seems incredible that Germans would mount a national campaign to eradicate Jews, since Jews were inextricably intertwined in the national and religious life of Germany. That some Jewish citizens were honored veterans of World War I was widely recognized. That Jewish citizens contributed to the economy of Germany was without question. That the state sanctioned religion of Lutheranism owed its origin to the Abrahamic religion of Judaism was undeniable. However, the propaganda provided by the Nazis denied the social and religious value of Judaism. Included in that propaganda was the case for the Aryan Jesus. One colleague asked if this author saw within this tale of the Aryan Jesus dogma a moral failure of the academy. The answer is: Yes. The Holocaust scholar John Roth chided philosophers who failed to meet the moral demands of their generation and speak out against genocide. Roth

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says, “philosophers have not been sufficiently self-critical about their bystanding and complicity.”13 Not only were individuals not fulfilling their moral obligation to resist evil, but institutions likewise failed to speak out for justice and truth. One may view the University of Jena as a moral collective. This state funded university in Germany failed to rise to fulfill its humanitarian duties to defend the rights of citizens to engage in free speech and thought. The policy of credentialing only doctoral candidates whose dissertations supported antisemitic conclusions was academically and morally blameworthy. If the university had either upheld the right of dissertation candidates to express their opinions or the opportunity to dissent, then it would not be blameworthy for depriving individuals of free speech and thought. Instead, this university intentionally promoted the Nazi agenda within the academy. To better understand this failure of the academy we may consider Glover’s critique of Heidegger and Roth’s critique of scholars who failed to speak out. Glover offers a searing critique of Heidegger’s participation in the NASDP and his failure to speak out against its antisemitism. 14 This author supposes that Heidegger found a retreat from the events of the day in his obscure phenomenology. Glover called Heidegger’s philosophy an “impenetrable fog.” Regarding his Nazi membership Glover writes, “Heidegger himself saw commitment to Nazism as an expression of his authenticity: of his awareness of what he took to be the destiny of the German people.”15 It seems to this author that Heidegger was dwelling in his own conceptual cocoon. Glover’s criticism leaves open the question of whether the academy itself supported or enticed Heidegger to remain loyal to the Nazis. Compare the experience of Heidegger and Grundmann. Grundmann was a professor of theology. As we observed he served as an administrator of the ISEJI and as a professor at the University of Jena. Grundmann along with other faculty members were fully committed to the support of Nazi ideals. This commitment was embedded in their academy. The university gave them a forum to voice their support of Nazism and a position of authority where they could promote sympathizers and shape scholarship. His university was a collaborative collective. In the post-war criminal proceedings, some perpetrators were tried as actual murderers. Not a few brought to trial were regarded as “desk killers,” that is, Nazis who gave orders that Jews, Roma, and others were to be killed. In their defense administrators on trial pled that they had no blood on their hands. Heidegger and Grundman could not only plead that they had no blood

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on their hands but that their stock-and-trade was philosophy or theology. Neither Grundman nor Heidegger was brought to trial in the post-war proceedings. Likewise, no universities were considered fair subjects for criminal proceedings at the time. Yet, the two thinkers in their own way and with the help of the academy supported and furthered the ideology of the Nazis that enticed murderers to kill their victims. The German DS church was likewise responsible for embracing the Aryan Jesus dogma. Consistent with dogma were the prohibitions found in the Aryan paragraph. If one regards the appointment to clerical positions as a discretionary matter, the state church could have defended its exclusion of non-Aryans from the clergy as a matter of preference. This would be consistent with a state-based religion that bowed to the sovereignty of the state. However, the deprivation of more basic rights of person of Jewish ancestry such as denial of the sacrament of marriage may be viewed as uncharitable or non-virtuous behavior. To the extent that members and leaders of the German DS Church may have contributed directly to the violent mistreatment of Jews, they stand condemned.

Conclusion Apart from its bells and whistles, propaganda aims to appeal to some of the most basic appetites and instincts of humanity. It performs a subtle work of shaping the moral imagination by defining the right and the wrong. Often propaganda gives people reason to believe what they want to believe, though the reason it gives may be unfounded. It may build upon subtle but not sound reasoning. This should become evident when we examine the case for the Aryan Jesus dogma. Consider this simple material implication: If Jesus was a Jew, then Jews deserve respect. The case for the Aryan Jesus dogma asserts that Jesus was not a Jew. Logically, the denial of the consequent that Jews deserve respect, does not follow from the denial of the antecedent, Jesus was not a Jew. Nonetheless, the Nazis expended significant effort to convince the public that Jesus was not a Jew.

Notes 1. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003),112. 2. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 101

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3. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, 154. 4. Suzannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 201. 5. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 237. 6. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 118. 7. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1999), 52. 8. Ericksen and Heschel, Betrayal, 55. 9. Ericksen and Heschel, Betrayal, 53. 10. See Jacob W. Arnold, “Jesus as an Historical Jew.” Judaism, 46 (3, 1997): 375–380. 11. Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus. Edited by Joseph Henry Allen (New York: Little, Brown, 1924), 93. 12. Renan, Life of Jesus, 173. 13. Roth, Ethics During and After the Holocaust, 161. 14. Glover, Humanity, 371 15. Glover, Humanity, 375.

PART II

The Peak Phase of Genocide in the Holocaust

CHAPTER 7

The Holocaust and the Ideal of Purity

Introduction The preceding chapters have examined how ethical decisions in the Holocaust were shaped by identification, symbolization, and discrimination, Stanton’s three early stages of genocide. As we considered the laws that discriminated, we saw how these could segue into Stanton’s fourth stage of dehumanization. Stanton’s fifth stage is organization. This chapter looks at purification as an organizing principle for perpetrators and terrorists that is present from the earliest stages of the process. Jason Campbell has made a compelling argument that the Nazis were driven by genocidal intent as demonstrated in their forethought and planning.1 He said, “I wholly deny that the act of genocide could result from unorganized and unintended actions.” In other words, the deaths of Jews and other victims could not be identified as collateral damage as Holocaust deniers would argue, but their murder was intentional. In what way is the destruction of a group by killing valuable to the perpetrators of genocide? Campbell says, “the four motivations of genocidal intent are (1) the destruction of social interconnectedness, (2) identity reformation, (3) resource reallocation, and ultimately (4) the consolidation of power throughout the community of genocidal perpetrators.”2 The first two motivations focus upon what is done to the target group, while the last two motivations focus upon the material assets or political power perpetrators acquire for themselves. The third motivation is the transfer of goods, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_7

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resources, and wealth from victims to perpetrators, and perpetrators enlarge and expand their power basis through the incorporation of these stolen resources. Perpetrators act offensively to acquire these goods. Did perpetrators believe a defensive gain could be achieved? Yes, Nazis believed that the gain of safeguarding of their purity could be achieved. Purity is an ideal that acted as an organizing principle throughout the Holocaust. Stanton’s fifth stage of genocide is organization. The ideal of purity as an organizing principle is operational in the early stage of classification, drives symbolization, and serves as a precondition for discrimination. Perpetrators believed the purity of their race was under assault. Recall how Hitler described the male Jew as one who would attack and defile the purity of the Aryan female. As we begin a discussion about purity we may point to a tragic chapter in the history of America, namely, the era of slavery before emancipation and the lingering racism thereafter. In the United States in the 1920s Jim Crow laws were created to maintain purity of whiteness in the South, prior to the creation of Germany’s Aryan laws in the 1930s. The 1922 United States census used “pure blooded whited” as a designation to identify citizens. According to the one-drop rule, Caucasian blood could become impure if it were mixed with one drop of African blood. Jordan Liz observes, “The discourse of the one-drop rule stipulated that whiteness was a zero-sum game wherein only those free of nonwhite blood could, not only legally, but biologically identify as Caucasian.”3 Not infrequently one may find within the ideological core of a genocidal movement an ideal of purification. Genocidals, that is, perpetrators of genocide differ from terrorists in terms of the scale of operation and the role perpetrators play in the society. Perpetrators most often constitute a majority and can commandeer the social power structure of a society. By comparison terrorists aspire to attain a position of power, but they rarely constitute a majority within a society. Nonetheless genocidals and terrorists share many of the same dynamics. Perpetrators of genocide leverage the social dynamics of herd approbation and acceptance whereas terrorists rely upon the approbation of a smaller in-group. Both exist to preserve their purity, and both are defined by their belief that people they target as victims have the power to defile their purity. The notion that others threaten the purity of the in-group points to an insecurity within the in-­ group. Ironically in the Holocaust the blood line of the perpetrators was deemed to be so weak that a drop of non-Aryan blood could corrupt it.

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The moral community is justified in feeling outrage toward terrorists and outrage toward genocide. Though their actions differ in scale genocidals oppress innocent people for their imaginary good of purity. How can the moral community move beyond moral outrage to develop effective responses to genocide? We shall return to some practical responses in the final chapter. Before we can do so we must explore in greater depth the relationship of four terms: genocide, terrorism, violence, and purification.

The Definition of Genocide According to the American Heritage Dictionary the term terrorism appears in the English language in 1795. The origins of the terms violence and purification are ancient. By comparison, the term genocide was coined as late as 1944 by Raphael Lemkin.4 The term genocide is a combination of the roots of the words genus and homicide. So, etymologically it refers to the murder or slaying of a group, a genus. It is a misconception to suppose genocide refers to any mass murder. According to Larry May genocide refers to “acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”5 May observes that the destruction of a group does not necessarily entail killing. Natural species such as some flora can be destroyed by displacement or by cross pollination, and some fauna can be destroyed by crossbreeding, and these may lead to extinction in time. Social groups may be destroyed in a number of ways, and not all these methods of destruction require that the members of the group be killed. Some groups may be destroyed by non-lethal action such as displacement or by disrupting the solidarity of the group. Perpetrators of genocide have relied on rape, sterilization, and the displacement of persons to achieve their aim of eliminating an ethnic group. Like May I assume that genocide entails the destruction of groups but does not necessarily entail killing. Thus, I suppose the phenomenon of genocide may take more than one form. The hard form of genocide I take to be the destroying of a group and its members by killing. Hard genocide does not spare members of the group from eradication or extinction. The soft form of genocide I take to be the destroying of a group or its members by whatever non-lethal means prove effective. Both hard and soft genocide may be conducted overtly or covertly. If the intent of the perpetrators is eradication at any cost, then, the persons responsible may resort

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to mortal harm, that is, killing, and I shall refer to them simply as acts of genocide. A further distinction may be made between acts of genocide intended to result in immediate destruction of the group rather than the future destruction of a group. Rape or sterilization of members of the group may spare the lives of contemporary group members but ensure the future destruction of the group. In contrast, euthanizing members of the group would bring about the immediate destruction of the group.

The Scale of Genocide In his essay, “Innocence, Genocide, and Suicide Bombings,” Lawrence M.  Thomas says, “any view that justifies targeting manifestly innocent individuals of a group also justifies the genocide of that group.”6 While the class of innocents may include children or the incompetent, it also refers to civilians and non-combatants. I suspect Thomas is correct that terrorists would commit genocide if possible. Thomas indicates that the targeting of innocents often is intentionally done in the planning of terrorist acts. In other words, it is not mere happenstance that innocents get killed in terrorist attacks. Thomas’ assertion about the targeting of innocents adds to our basic understanding of genocide and terrorism. So, may we assert the following: All acts of genocide are acts of violence that target innocents? If we allow for the possibility that there may be covert acts of genocide, it remains to be shown whether the assertion is sound or if not. What does seem clear is that we cannot assert the converse, that is, the following: All acts of violence that target the innocent are acts of genocide. Genocide is not a universal category that includes all varieties of violence that target innocents. While the scale of mortal harm may distinguish genocide from some acts of terrorism, it is not simply the body count that sets the two types of violence apart. The murder of three or more victims may count as a mass killing. One should not conclude that terrorism is simply mass killing on a small scale and genocide is mass killing on a large scale. The 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11 was declared to be an act of terrorism. The body count for this single act of terrorism may exceed the body count in some instances of acts of genocide. Genocide and terrorism are both divisive. May’s definition of genocide suggests that groups or collectives in whole or in part are targets for violence. When genocide occurs one population goes on the offensive, and

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those who commit genocide become the oppressors. A divisive “us” versus “them” perception governs the behavior of the perpetrators and the intended victims. Thomas observes that terrorist acts such as suicide bombings are often thought to be reprisals, that is, acts of the oppressed.7 When given the chance the oppressed may become the oppressors, since their objective is the destruction of the alleged oppressor. Terrorists may or may not be justified in believing that they are oppressed and that their oppressors are intent upon their destruction. Rather than determine if their beliefs are mistaken, terrorists choose to defend themselves by resorting to violence. Furthermore, their reprisals against perceived enemies often do target innocents. I take genocide to be an inter-species phenomenon of Homo sapiens. Whether we choose to be nominalists about group identity within the species of humanity or if we choose to be realists, genocidal thought and action is divisive. Genocide posits a difference between members of the species and pits the members of one group against the members of another group. Those individuals willing to destroy members of the other group are perpetrators, and those whom they identify as objects to be destroyed I call members of the target group, that is, victims. In Rwanda from April to July 1994, at least one million Tutsis along with some Hutus became the targets of genocide.8 In the Holocaust the Jews were the target for the Nazi outpouring of antisemitic hatred and violence. In Becoming Evil, James Waller writes, “if the perpetrators were anti-Semites who believed that the extermination of Jews was right, then all the situational factors so commonly asserted to have motivated the killers are irrelevant. Everybody was antisemitic and antisemitism explains everything. “9 As we have suggested it is undeniable that antisemites hated Jews, but in the process of genocide antisemitic hatred was one among other factors. Here we are focusing upon the scale of violence mounted against the target group, but it is appropriate to inquire about the scale of opposition. Mass psychology does become a factor in understanding genocide, and the fabric of groups is not that of a seamless garment. Waller suggests that the perpetrators of genocide are enmeshed in a social group that may endorse genocide even if that endorsement is not overt. He says, “if you were a German in 1930 and were not blatantly antisemitic, it was only because your antisemitism ran so deep that it need not be expressed.”10 Socially entrenched antisemitism asserted a variety of peer pressure upon those who would act as perpetrators. In spite of this broad-based social endorsement of genocide, one should not believe that all members of a

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nation or an ethnic group necessarily sympathized with perpetrators of genocide. In “The Right to Life, Genocide, and the Problem of Bystander States,” David Jones suggests that both individuals within states such as Germany as well as whole states apart from Germany may count as bystanders, and I would agree.11 Bystanders may tolerate but not embody the full intent of the perpetrators. For their toleration they may be held responsible for complicity in wrongdoing. In other words, many bystanders have dirty hands. This may be discussed in a later chapter. Our focus is upon acts of hard genocide but acts of “soft” genocide may be conducted on the same scale. May suggests that the aim of genocide is the destruction of a group, but he believes dissolution of group identity without killing may satisfy the aims of soft genocide. May could be correct, if the perpetrators of genocide were content to disband the group without exterminating its members, or if it were impractical to exterminate all members of the group. Nonetheless, the aim of hard genocide is the complete destruction a targeted group. For those who intend to commit genocide, the surest means is mass murder. So, I would maintain that the following assertion can be made: All persons who are members of a target group are persons taken to be fair game for complete destruction by the perpetrators of genocide. This was true in the Holocaust when Nazis regarded Jews and other non-Aryans as targets for extermination.

The Failure of Purification as the Ideal of Genocide Destruction of an ethnic group is a violence, and the intent of hard genocide as well as soft genocide is to destroy (if not fully then to the greatest extent possible) an identifiable group of individuals. Hence, the intent of genocide is a violent intent. Jason Campbell suggests that genocidal intent may evolve from discrimination to full-blown genocidal intent. For Campbell genocide is a variety of hatred that is unchecked.12 When nonlethal means are used to destroy a group, the danger remains that the group could be reconstituted or could retaliate. Not just murder but also torture and rape are used by perpetrators in a genocide. In Claudia Card’s description of genocide by rape, she points out that the perpetrators rely on the members of the victim group to reject the victims of rape and the children that are sired.13 Her example is that of the Serbian rape of Muslims leaving Bosnia. This is not a genocide by killing, but it is a genocide by social death of the group.14 This social death

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would come about when the mother or child or both were rejected by the community. If the ethnic group reconsidered and assimilated the victims and the children of rape, it would defeat the aim of the perpetrators. In contrast to Serbian troops, German military personnel in the Holocaust were instructed not to defile themselves, and the unstated assumption was if they were to resort to rape, they would pollute the pure German blood line. Reliance on mass killing to destroy a group tends to confirm the power of the oppressors. Since their aim is to destroy an entire population, this may explain why perpetrators of genocide do not hesitate to resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction like dirty bombs or biological agents. 15 The intent of terrorists who are able to acquire weapons of mass destruction is likewise the maximal destruction of members of a target population. To execute the intent of genocide perpetrators must be able to distinguish the markers that set members of their group apart from the victims. These markers may be natural, biological markers or non-natural markers such as ideological viewpoints. Nazis relied primarily on the Aryan Protocol to identify potential victims. When birth records failed to provide sufficient information to judge that the person was Aryan, Nazis might resort to phenotypes. They prepared elaborates indexes of bodily traits to determine whether individuals looked Aryan or not. Nazis even used ideological viewpoints to identify potential victims. Persons of Jewish descent were catalogued through their public census, and the technology used to collate the data was IBM punch card machines.16 Not infrequently these markers make distinctions without a difference, and they demonstrate the perpetrator’s criteria for identifying victims to be arbitrary. In his article, “How African Are You?” John Hawks says newer genetic tests for ancestry “don’t tell which ancestors lived where, and they can’t detect traces of ancestry.”17 Numerous scholars suggest that race is largely a social construct given the breadth of detail within any single collective identified as a race. Racists in the Antebellum South used the one-drop rule as a marker to distinguish who would count as a descendent of African ancestry and who would not. In their deployment of the Aryan Protocol, Nazis investigated not only an individual’s ancestry and physiological traits but also an individual’s ideological commitments. A person could be declared non-Aryan if they embraced a communist or socialist ideology. The association of a race with an ideological commitment invited abuse.

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For several reasons one may conclude that the intent of genocide requires that the practitioners engage in self-deception. First, biodiversity within the human species ensures that the markers relied upon to make hard distinctions of racial differences are not absolute.18 Second, soft markers relied upon to make social distinctions are as changeable as the winds of politics. Third, not infrequently the practitioners of genocide destroy members of their own group to safeguard the accrual of power, since diversity or dissent cannot be tolerated. Fourth, practitioners of genocide act upon the assumption that they lack the strength required to exist in proximity with the target group and also maintain their biological or social purity. This deep-seated insecurity of perpetrators underlies their reliance upon violence to achieve their ends. Fifth, the intention of the practitioners of genocide is most often executed by soldiers or designated agents who must be conditioned to kill, and that conditioning process requires that the soldiers or agents act as if members of the target group were inhuman.19 Stanton’s fourth stage of genocide is dehumanization, and conceptual dehumanization most often precedes killing. The perpetrators refuse to see the victims as persons with moral worth.

Crafting Moral and Practical Responses to Genocide We have identified five classes of actors in relation to genocide: (1) those who perpetrate genocide; (2) those who are targets of genocide, that is, victims; (3) those who are internal bystanders; (4) those who are external bystanders; and (5) opponents of genocide. Internal bystanders are members of a society or state where genocide is happening, whereas persons outside that society or state may count as external bystanders. Active opponents of genocide may include rescuers. In response to antisemitism, discrimination, or hate speech the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) advises: “If you see something, say something.” I suppose that the opponents of genocide are not responsible for the commission of genocide, though they may oppose genocide for non-moral reasons. Moral opponents of genocide are individuals who are outraged by genocidal violence and communicating their active opposition may relieve them of responsibility for complicity. It is important that the moral opponents of genocide overtly condemn genocide and mass atrocity as morally outrageous. We shall return to this moral obligation in

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the concluding chapter. Given the lack of moral outrage of bystanders, the task of crafting a moral response to genocide falls to the opponents or the victims of genocide. This lack of moral outrage may be a demonstration of moral insensitivity, and that shall be discussed in a later chapter. Opponents of genocide may persuade bystanders to see the danger of genocide by invoking a consequential moral argument about the self-­ defeating nature of purification. We saw previously that the perpetrators of genocide intentionally aimed to purify themselves by the elimination of the target group. Continuance of the target group was seen as a threat to the existence of the perpetrators. When mortal harm becomes the type of violence that best preserves or enhances purity, any external or internal threat to purity must be met by the violence of killing. When the threat to purity arises from within the perpetrators of genocide, then the group must destroy parts of itself for the sake of purity. Readers of Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, are reminded of how dissenting members of the Stalinist party who were not pure socialists were killed for the sake of ideological purify. In both instances the outcome is destructive. By appealing to the character development of perpetrators of genocide opponents can craft a virtuous alternative. The perpetrators undertake a program of social destruction that prompts their own character destruction as they become desensitized to the humanity of the target group. To them members of the target group are seen as impersonal objects that lack personhood due to ancestry or ideology, and these non-persons may be killed. This unchecked program of character desensitization can produce moral monsters. While the virtue of care is being systematically annihilated within these individuals, the vices of viciousness and callousness are being developed. So, unless the moral community asks the perpetrators to engage in introspective questioning about the type of character they are developing, their moral corruption will continue unchecked. Perpetrators should be asked, “Do you find yourself immolating a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or an Adolph Hitler in terms of the welfare of the those you target like Jews? Why?” Given the scale of genocide, a political response is often needed.20 Only two examples of political responses are cited here. Some opponents of genocide have worked cooperatively to craft a moral and legal response to genocide that has been identified as the right to defend or R2D.  This response is based on the commonsense notion adopted in many legal codes that an individual has a right to defend his or her person when mortal harm is threatened. Don Hubert notes that R2D has been recognized

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by some international tribunals, but it has not become a legal norm.21 R2D empowers the target group to defend their right to life, but if R2D is to be effective the target group may need powerful allies. David Jones supposes that if a rapid response force (RRF) were to be developed as a standing force, the RRF could come to the aid of target populations. This would fill a role similar to that of the International Criminal Court (ICC) that stands ready to bring to court neglected cases involving crimes against humanity. A nation that created an RRF would align itself with the opponents of genocide and also exonerate itself of the responsibility of remaining an external bystander. On the surface R2D and RRF appear to uphold the target population’s right to life. Upon closer examination there is a danger in R2D and RFF, and that is the danger of licensing violence. One practical problem that emerges is that the force used to resist the perpetrators of genocide may result in more total casualties. In other words, this response may simply endorse more violence and killing. Those opponents of genocide who aim to eschew the reliance upon mortal harm may wish to craft other moral responses.

Conclusion This brief overview of the moral problem of genocide focuses upon the nature, scale and intent of genocide. It aims to provide moral opponents of genocide some conceptual tools to make effective moral appeals to other actors to stop genocidal killing. Perpetrators of genocide may believe themselves to be morally justified in the use of deadly force to maintain their purity. Genocide and terrorism both rely upon campaigns of violence to achieve their aims, and they value purity of the in-group. By taking steps to empower the victims of genocide to defend themselves the opponents of genocide arrive at a best of bad solutions, since empowerment to retaliate relies upon the use of violent force. Better methods of combating genocide may be open to the opponents such as convincing bystanders that it is in their best interest to oppose genocide. Since the practitioners of genocide sanction killing without awareness of this as their moral blind spot, opponents of genocide may hope to persuade the perpetrators to act otherwise if they can be shown that they are becoming vicious moral monsters. The ideal of purity is an ideological belief and commitment. It is a dangerous self-love that can be a manifestation of hatred. Left unchecked it can grow. As the hatred grows it can become organized and polarized.

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Terrorists organize themselves against the enemy, and genocidal perpetrators organize themselves against their victims. Unchecked hatred can mature into preparation for persecution and more. In Germany Nazi perpetrators outfitted vans and faux showers to gas Jews. In Rwanda perpetrators bought cases of machetes to prepare for the planned slaughter of victims. Execution is an unbridled expression of hatred that denies the other dignity and the right to life. In the next chapter we shall discuss victims who take flight from persecution or execution. Thus, we pass from our discussion of the preliminary stages of genocide to the climactic stage of genocide, Stanton’s stage nine, the stage of execution.

Notes 1. Jason Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, 55. 2. Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, 102. When we discuss genocidal intent, it is a generalization of the intent of perpetrators. It should be understood that some individual wreaking havoc during a genocide may have had intentions of their own such as debauchery or greed. 3. Jordan Liz, “‘The Fixity of Whiteness’: Genetic Admixture and the Legacy of the One-Drop Rule” Critical Philosophy of Race 6 (2, 2018): 239–61. 4. Larry May, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 5. May, Genocide, 4. 6. Lawrence Thomas, “Innocence, Genocide, and Suicide Bombings” in Genocide and Human Rights (London, United Kingdom: Palgrave, 2005), 187. 7. Lawrence Thomas, “Innocence, Genocide, and Suicide Bombings,” 187. 8. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 232. 9. James Waller, Becoming Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 43. 10. Waller, Becoming Evil, 49. 11. John K.  Roth, Genocide and Human Rights (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 269. 12. Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, 60, 154. 13. Card, Confronting Evils, 272. 14. Card, Confronting Evils, 180. 15. Encyclopedia of Genocide, 250. 16. For a description of this technology see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York, New York, Crown Publishers, 2001). 17. John Hawks, “How African Are You?” Science, March 15, 2006.

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18. Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, 121. 19. Dave Grossman, On Killing (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009), 151. 20. Only two possible political responses are cited here, namely, the right to defend (R2D) and the rapid response force (RRF). The author plans to include a more robust discussion of political responses in a separate manuscript. 21. Robert L. Rothberg, Mass Atrocity Crimes (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2010),109.

CHAPTER 8

Resistance and Neighborly Aid

Introduction This chapter explores how individuals become the victims of genocide and in what ways victims and others could resist the violence of perpetrators of genocide. Even before Nazi perpetrators organized and equipped themselves for executing mass murders, they created a social environment of increasing injustice and oppression. In his own society Henry David Thoreau observed that unjust laws exist. As we noted in Chap. 2 this presented for him an existential crisis. In the Holocaust victims faced an existential crisis as they decided how to cope with unjust laws during the stages of genocide that precede mass killing. Likewise, soldiers and civilian bystanders who had the moral sensitivity to recognize the injustice of the moment had to determine how they would proceed. Soldiers could be guilty of subordination or treason if they were to defy law and order. Noncombatants and civilian bystanders could be guilty of unlawful activity if they were to defy law and social norms. Rescuers could be guilty of wrongful intervention if they were to cross national borders to interfere in local affairs. Should any of them have ignored the injustice? Should any of them have called attention to the injustice while they waited for a change of social attitudes and law? Or should any of them have rejected the social attitudes to disobey the law? This chapters explores how and why victims and rescuers answered these questions.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_8

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The individual cases examined in this chapter represent moral choices of victims and resisters. These are the instances when persons recognized that unjust laws exist, and they chose to resist those laws. Even victims may become resisters against the perpetrators of genocidal violence. 1 Collectively these instances of resistance make an inductive argument that contradicts those who deny the significance of Jews’ resistance. Deborah Lipstadt would categorize these deniers as soft or revisionist deniers rather than hard core deniers.2 Hard core denial that the Holocaust happened is the last stage of Stanton’s stages of genocide. All resisters are not passive bystanders. In sympathy and action resisters distinguish themselves from indifferent bystanders. Resistance could be mounted in novel and subtle ways if not by means of open conflict. Indirect causal connections and oblique intentions should be examined when we consider the complicity of individuals in genocidal killing. The widow who rented a room to Jan Karski intended to collect rent, but by obliquely intending to help a man whom she suspected to be an enemy of the state she could qualify as a resister. The family who welcomed him after his escape from the Nazis directly aided him. The farmers who offered food stuff to partisans could count as resisters, since they were indirectly responsible for aiding the victims. The radio broadcaster who sent a coded message over the airwaves for partisans or for an underground government was a resister. The members of the White Rose who printed pamphlets that exposed the criminal behavior of the Nazis were resisters. Thus, the number of persons who could count as true bystanders may have been far less than some have supposed. If genocide is a process, then the efficacy of resistance may be determined by its timing. Resistance offered early in the process may take a different form than resistance offered when full-blown genocide and mass killing is underway. Early resistance to classification or symbolization could best be offered through the media and mass communication. Or it could take the form of open disagreement when discrimination is expressed in word or print. More active forms of resistance would be required during the later phases of persecution and extermination. Before examining how rescuers including resisters came to the aid of victims, we shall benefit from pausing to consider how the individuals became victims in a genocide.

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Becoming Targets of Genocidal Violence To a gathering of scholars and colleagues meeting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Anthropologist and genocide expert Alexander Hinton posed a question: What if you or your friends and family became the targets of genocidal violence?3 Perhaps perpetrators live with the notion that they are exempt from genocidal violence, but any ethnic group could become victims. Prior to the Hutu uprising in the Rwanda genocide the Hutus had been victims of violence and discrimination. Hatred in the form of antisemitism was entrenched in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Jews, Roma, and many others the rise of the NASDP was a forewarning that hatred could dominate the culture. Even before November of 1938 individuals had their suspicions of the Gestapo’s intentions, but they could not foresee that their neighbors and coworkers would turn upon them suddenly. Already Germany was experiencing the priming phase of genocide when classification, symbolization, discrimination, and dehumanization were happening. The German census made official the classification and symbolization of non-Aryans and moved the Nazis closer to the final stages of genocide. Some wary Jews sensed a change in the social environment and fled Germany in time to escape the Holocaust. Others who could not flee sensed that a confrontation was inevitable. The family of Max Kopfstein was living in Berlin at the time, and to forestall any untoward encounters with the Gestapo, they worked out a code to signal when agents would appear to question or detain family members.4 What Kopfstein and others could not predict was the way the general population including their neighbors would condone and participate in the vandalizing of Jewish property and the hazing of Jews. During Kristallnacht individuals became the targets of violent reprisals for imaginary crimes, and synagogues and businesses were destroyed without reprisals. By 1938 laws were already written to prohibit Jews from holding public office or intermarrying with non-Jews. In October orders were given for 1200 Jews to leave Germany. That Fall when Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew, shot Ernst von Rath in Paris at the German embassy, the Nazis seized on the news to stir public sentiment against the Jews in Germany.5 On the decisive night of November 9, 1938, the citizens of Germany under the prompting of the Gestapo struck out against Jews with violence. The violence spilled over into the morning of November

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10. Individuals were subjected to ridicule and horrendous beatings, and businesses and worship centers were destroyed. It is estimated that on that single night over ninety individuals were killed and over a thousand businesses and synagogues were ransacked and destroyed. 6 Martin Gilbert says, Kristallnacht was the culmination of more than five years and nine months of systematic discrimination and persecution. From the first days of Hitler’s regime in Germany, anti-Jewish measures followed with disturbing frequency. The half million Jews of Germany, who constituted a mere 0.76 per cent of the country’s population, were singled out by the Nazi propaganda machine as the enemy within, the cause of Germany’s defeat in 1918 and of her subsequent economic difficulties. As a scapegoat, the Jews were vulnerable.7

While the damage to businesses and synagogues during Kristallnacht was tremendous and the loss of lives was lamentable, that night of destruction would pale beside the mass murders that would follow in coming months and years. That victims did not foresee the threat of mortal harm seems incredible, but the threat defies credibility. On that November night the threat of suffering genocidal violence was imminent and immediate, but the Jews who were targeted were for the most part unwitting victims. Compare those early murders with the murders that would take place under the cloak of war. The Babi Yar ravine in the Ukraine became the site of the killing of 33,771 Jews in September 1941. The pattern for mass murder at this site would be repeated over and over. Jews at Babi Yar were also unwitting victims, though they would have heard incredible rumors of violence against Jews. The actions leading up to the murders were well rehearsed. A band of soldiers would come into town and gather the intended victims. A ravine was selected or dug. Victims were led in batches to the site and positioned on the edge of the ravine. Then the expert shooters would shoot the victims in the base of the skull to kill the victims. A few would escape by flight if they were not executed on the spot.8 The next gathering of victims did not foresee that they were being led at gunpoint to their place of murder. They could neither flee nor offer genuine resistance. This was one of many mass graves where Nazis killed Jews in the Ukraine and elsewhere. By 1942 another method for mass killing was being deployed—poison gas-vans. These gas-vans were fitted to deliver poison gas to those trapped inside the van. The individuals would be loaded into the van with the

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promise that they would be transported to some distant site. Once sealed in the van they would be asphyxiated. The Sonderkommandos, that is, members of a special forces unit, were responsible for unloading the dead bodies. One group member reported, The Jews had to climb into the van fully clothed … Men, women, and children all had to get in together. I estimate that about sixty people had to get in each time. They had to climb up some steps to get into the van. It did not seem as if the Jews knew that they were about to be gassed.9

The efficiency of the killing centers such as Auschwitz is well documented. During the summer of 1942 approximately 1000 Jews were killed daily in the camp. Details of how those murders were carried out may be discussed later.

Resistance for Dignity’s Sake In the introduction I recognized individuals’ right to life as a basic right. I suggest that existence, that is, basic survival activities, constitutes a sufficient defense of one’s right to life. By one’s existence one communicates in deed or word their claim to a right to life. In this view one who has the right to life has dignity that should be respected. Those who believe that sets the bar too low for the defense of a right to life may require a more robust defense. If the person failed to act in ways that preserve life, it could constitute a de facto surrender of that right. In other words, by their inaction the bearer of that right to life would demonstrate little or no value was assigned to that right. That would cancel the duty to respect that right, and the bearer of that right should remain indifferent to its violation, if the value of that right were negligible. In contrast, when one’s effort to exist constitutes a minimal defense of one’s right, then the actor has done enough to have defended his or her right to life. Active resistance is beyond that minimal defense. Even if resistance were unsuccessful, it would satisfy the claim that an individual did defend his or her right to life.10 On the one hand, critics and Holocaust deniers who sympathized with perpetrators may place the onus on victims to demonstrate that they valued their right to life. In other words, critics and Holocaust deniers may fault victims as failing to demonstrate that they were willing to defend their right to life. This objection can become part of the narrative of

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Holocaust denial. Deniers may portray victims as insufficiently concerned about their right to life. However, a nominal interest in life would qualify one as having defended his or her right to life in the minimalist view. For instance, an infant crying for nourishment could meet this criterion identified here. A man in a chokehold would meet the criterion, if he said, “I can’t breathe.” To prove he valued his life he would not be required to break free from the chokehold. On the other hand, the mere fact that victims had the negative right to life is reason to believe no further defense of the right was required. The requirement that an individual must successfully fight for the right to life is an appeal to brute force, and possession of a right to life is not dependent on an exercise of brute force. Underlying the mistaken notion that an individual must first defend his or her right to life is the implicit notion that an acceptable defense is contingent upon the amount of force displayed. In this view the perpetrator and not the victim determines whether the display of force is sufficiently strong or if not. The defense rises to the level demanded by the perpetrator only if it is a sufficiently strong display of brute force. If the victim did not shout at a certain level or punch and kick a minimal number of times, then the victim would fail to provide a sufficiently strong display of force to demonstrate the right to life was valued. The requirement that a victim’s defense of his or her right to life must rise to a minimal level stipulated by a perpetrator seems mistaken. Thus, it is important to assume at the outset that genocide does wrong victims, whether they were able to defend their right to life by an arbitrarily sufficient show of strength or if not. What constitutes a reasonable defense of an individual’s negative right to life? I have suggested that existence, that is, basic survival activities constitute a reasonable defense of an individual’s negative right to life. This author supposes that a reasonable defense of an individual’s negative right to life is analogous to a reasonable defense of a negative right to privacy. If a person is occupying a motel room with a window, it is reasonable to expect that the individual will close the curtains, if the individual aims to defend his or her right to privacy. It is not reasonable to expect the individual to nail plywood sheets over the window to defend his or her privacy. The range of activities that could count as a reasonable defense of a right to life may be relatively broad and include basic acts of survival like procurement of food and shelter or even educational activities that aim at improving one’s quality of life. When one has performed these activities, one has defended his or her right to life. One’s dignity presupposes one’s

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rights including one’s right to life. As such, one’s living becomes a defense of one’s dignity. No further effort would be needed to establish one’s dignity. Resistance may be understood as the refusal of victims or rescuers to succumb to the perpetrators’ intention to harm. Resistance represents an intention to preserve life and wellbeing, and it acts as a countermeasure to the perpetrators’ intention. It need not take the form of armed violence. In the example below it appears as stoic resignation. Deniers refuse to recognize the inference to be drawn from the intentional resistance of victims, namely, that perpetrators were acting intentionally. Consider the testimony of Tova Friedman. Picture her as a five-year-old child in Birkenau during a roll call. By acting impulsively, she drew attention to herself as the matron called roll. Her childish act of insubordination provoked the wrath of the matron. In a rage the matron began to slap the face of Tova again and again and again, never stopping until the matron had exhausted herself on brutalizing the child, Tova. The severe bruising that resulted lasted for several days. Tova knew that her life was in danger, and that any movement from her construed as an act of retaliation could result in her swift murder. Nevertheless, at five years of age Tova was intentional in her resistance toward the harm she was experiencing. She intentionally refused to cry. She said, My cheeks were burning from the attack, but I refused to cry. Even at that age I had no intention of being a victim. My mind used that same coping mechanism I had first encountered in Starachowice: dissociation. As the slaps rained down, my consciousness took a ride and I had another out-of-body experience. 11

Acts of resistance may rise slightly above basic defenses of a right to life and aim at self-preservation, or they may greatly exceed the basic level of activity needed to defend one’s right to life and include the defense of the rights of others. Resistance in self-defense would be an extension of one’s basic defense of a right to life. From a deontological viewpoint an act of resistance in defense of another could count as a supererogatory act. The individual who wrestles an armed attacker to the ground may be simply defending his or her right to life. The individual who wrestles with an active shooter in an attempt to shield innocent bystanders from gunfire may be performing a supererogatory act.

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Underlying the questions about the adequacy of the victim’s resistance are some vague notions about resistance and its quantification. Implicit is the notion that an unspecified quantity of resistance by the victim is required. Lack of sufficient resistance would warrant the claim that the victim was indifferent about his or her right to life, thus demonstrating the victim lacked dignity. Without stipulating the amount of resistance that would qualify as enough resistance to defend the victims’ dignity the problem becomes a paradox of heaps to be resolved by an arbitrary amount of resistance. Furthermore, it assumes that resistance would be quantifiable and covert. The critic’s notion that Holocaust victims’ defense of their right to life was too weak fails to consider how victims collaborated with others who came to their aid. Resistance by clandestine means could go unnoticed at the time it was offered and even later. A radio operator who passed along information that Germany was about to invade Russia was resisting the Nazis. The fact that the transmissions were made in secret and the fact that the transmissions failed to reach their intended recipients due to a miscommunication about their timing did not cancel the value of the effort as an exercise in resistance. Successful acts of resistance are a defense of the victim’s dignity, but they may exceed the minimal activity needed to defend a victim’s dignity. It seems more reasonable to see resistance as a sufficient and non-necessary condition for the defense of the dignity of victims, and some defensive acts of resistance may qualify as supererogatory acts. An old Jewish law holds that the virtue of a woman needed no defense, if the woman were in no position to defend her virtue. For instance, if a woman was raped in the open field and the woman did not cry out for help, then there was no question that the woman’s virtue had been wrongly violated. 12 A woman could be faulted for failure to defend her virtue, only if circumstances permitted the woman to raise a cry of alarm with the likelihood that it would be heard. There was no expectation that the woman would successfully fend off the advances of her attacker. Rather, raising an alarm of harm was sufficient to defend her virtue. Arguably Jews in Nazi Germany were placed in the position of the woman who could not defend her virtue, or they were placed in the position of the woman who could and did attempt to defend her virtue but to no avail. Resistance could take many forms, and resistance is to be understood relative to the victims’ and resisters’ circumstances.

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Flight or hiding are both well documented forms of resistance. Those who secreted themselves in attics, barns, and elsewhere relied upon the support of sympathetic persons. The countless persons who hid Jews from Nazis risked their own lives in the process. Those who sought refuge and those who hid the victims adopted a non-violent form of resistance. One of the well documented cases of resistance is found in the Diary of Anne Frank. From July 6, 1942, to August 4, 1944, the Frank family managed to avoid capture and deportation from Holland by the Nazis by going into hiding.13 They and the Van Daan family secreted themselves in apartments above a business that was accessible by a disguised entryway. The family’s efforts to remain hidden represent a bold and courageous form of resistance. Eventually someone close to the family exposed them. The family was deported to Westerbork, where they were separated. Anne and her sister were sent to Bergen-Belsen where Anne succumbed to the plague. Only a few excerpts from her diary are offered here to illustrate how maintaining a life in hiding was a form of resistance for this family as it was for others. For months as many of our goods and chattels and necessities of life as possible had been sent away and they were sufficiently ready for us to have gone into hiding of our own accord on July 16. The plan had to be speeded up ten days because of the call-up, so our quarters would not be so well organized, but we had to make the best of it.—Thursday, 9 July 194214 I’ve got only dismal and depressing news for you today. Our many Jewish friends are being taken away by the dozen. These people are treated by the Gestapo without a shred of decency, being loaded into cattle trucks and sent to Westerbork, the big Jewish camp in Drente.…It is impossible to escape; most of the people in the camp are branded as inmates by their shaven heads and many also by their Jewish appearance.—Friday, 9 October 194215 Burglars again, but real this time!…The standing orders for such times were observed as usual: no taps to be turned on; therefore, no washing, silence, everything to be finished by eight o’clock and no lavatory.—Friday, 16 July 194316 Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? Is it God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too who will raise us up again.…Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good… Tuesday, 11 April 194417

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Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Not necessarily. Russian troops did become rescuers of Jews during the later months of the Holocaust, but during the early years Russian troops may have been more inclined to allow antisemitic sentiments to influence their treatment of Jews when Poland became a divided territory. Some rescuers valued the welfare of victims directly, and others valued the welfare of victims incidentally. U.S. and Allied troops who were responsible for the liberation of persons in concentration camps may have valued the welfare of victims indirectly. Civilians who came to the aid of victims qualify as individuals who valued the welfare of victims directly. Both shall be considered at greater length below. As we think of resistance and rescue, we must consider the stage when resistance and rescue is offered. Both resistance and rescue take different forms if these interventions happen in the priming phase of genocide rather than during the peak phase of genocide. Furthermore, we must consider the difference between overt and covert operations. The Jews that sought to resist by flight or by hiding enlisted the aid of citizens who were willing to resist the Nazis. These allies in flight and hiding were important as resisters who contributed to the saving of lives of Jews and others. In his book, My Brother’s Keeper, Rod Gragg chronicles thirty cases from among many cases of persons who chose to preserve the lives of Jews. Without their aid many would otherwise have become the victims of the Nazis’ reign of terror. Consider just three of these cases. Some Jews living in Poland had the foresight to flee when Nazi troops began to overrun the country in 1939. Those who remained had to determine how they would avoid the campaign of violence that followed. One couple near Markowa anticipated that there would be innocent persons still in the country who would need help—Józef and Wiktoria Ulma. This couple along with their six children lived on a farm. The father begun preparations by creating a safe place in their attic for Jews who sought their shelter. In the secret attic Ulmas safely sheltered a couple and their daughter, the Goldmans, for nearly a year. By day, the Goldmans and the Ulma family members worked on the farm, and by night the Goldmans hid in the attic. Eventually the Ulmas were exposed by Wlodzimierz Les. Les, a policeman, had harbored the Goldmans until they could no longer pay hush money. When they left unexpectedly, Les lost their ransom money. Les eventually learned the whereabouts of the Goldmans, and he exposed them to the Nazis. This led to the execution of both the Goldmans and

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the Ulma family. Les chose the path of a collaborator who was complicit in the killing of the Ulma family. The Ulmas chose the path of nonviolent resistance and forfeited their lives.18 Major Max Liedtke was an officer in the German Wehrmacht, but he chose the path of resistance to protect Jews in the town where he served. Liedtke was ordered to oversee the district of Przemysl in July 1942. He recognized that many Jews lived in the area and would soon be captured by the approaching SS troops. To forestall the capture of the Jews, Liedtke made the bold move to place an armed blockade on the only bridge that allowed access to the town. This allowed many Jews just enough time to flee from the area. The SS troops did not attack their own soldiers. This proved to be a temporary solution when SS troops managed to break through to the Przemysl Ghetto and proceeded to deport the remaining Jews. The officers who were responsible for the blockade were dismissed from their posts, but they were not executed. Liedtke continued his military career and later was captured by the Soviets. When Liedtke died in a Soviet labor camp, he died as a German officer who had distinguished himself as a resister.19 In Norway, Hans Christen Mamen found a novel method of offering non-violent resistance. He chose to be a trail guide to Norwegian Jews and others fleeing from the Nazis. There as elsewhere an underground railroad was developed to transport potential victims from danger to the safety of Switzerland. Mamen was a hiker and outdoorsman, and he used these skills to lead persons cross country through the rugged woods and trails to safety. Eventually he would have to make the woodland journey to save his own life.20 Maman and the Ulma family knew the persons they were saving by name. Major Liedtke knew the persons simply as residents of the town where he was stationed. These resisters had direct contact with the persons they were to defend. This was not always the case for all resisters. Some acted on behalf of persons that they never met, and others acted on behalf of a population that they believed were treated unjustly. In each case these individuals were defying the laws against aiding or sheltering Jews. They each were motivated by a different law, the law of their Christian religion to care for the welfare of others. They did not wait to see if the laws could be changed but defied the unjust laws. Notable among the collectives that would attempt to resist the Nazis was the group known as the White Rose. This group of resisters were committed to nonviolent resistance. Members of the White Rose were

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academics. They assumed that if they informed the public of the Nazis’ murderous intentions the people would be persuaded to join in mass resistance that would result in the destruction of the Nazi reign of terror. To that end they focused upon the creation and distribution of printed pamphlets and fliers that could be widely distributed. Core members responsible for the creation of the fliers placed their own lives in jeopardy as well as members of the extended group. When they were exposed, the Nazis made short work of the group by executing its members. There was no negotiating. Members were declared to be engaged in treasonous acts and swiftly sentenced to death. Members of the group committed to nonviolence were left defenseless against this tyranny. Their position may have appeared to be indefensible but given their commitment to nonviolence they upheld their dignity to the end. 21 In principle they knew they were defending persons who had a right to life, though they did not interact directly with the victims they were defending.22 They defied the laws of Germany, but they were committed to the practice of nonviolent ideals. Couriers count as an important group of individuals who resisted the perpetrators of genocide. They valued the welfare of victims, but they were not necessarily defending victims in person or directly. Historians can make only a rough estimate of the number of couriers who may have aided victims, since they were working incognito. Couriers may be divided into unwitting couriers and fully informed couriers. Leah Silversteen counts as an unwitting courier who carried messages for the partisans and others. Silversteen was a victim who became a resister. The sealed communiques or supplies that Silversteen carried were useful to contacts in ways that may not have been completely obvious to the carrier.23 The passing of coded or sealed communications was intended to protect both the courier and the network sending the message. Leah Hammerstein was another exemplary courier.24 Her parents were captives in the Warsaw ghetto. Although she was part of the Jewish workforce in Warsaw, she managed to gain entrance to the Aryan side thanks to her Aryan features. This allowed her passage in and out of the Jewish ghetto. Outside the ghetto she assumed the name of a Polish Catholic, Leokadia Bukowaska. She could carry messages from the underground to partisans outside the city without detection, while working under her assumed identity. Messages, money, and even an occasional gun passed through the hands of couriers. It was a daring life of resistance that placed the individual at risk at all times. For that reason, couriers received little information about members of the larger groups. Speaking of the isolation she experienced as a courier she said,

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You know you are among people, and yet you are like an island. You have to make life-and-death decisions all by yourself… you never know whether your choices would be successful or not. It is like playing Russian roulette with your own life. And it is not one incident; it [was] this way from the moment I came to the Aryan side. Day after day.25

Jan Karski counts as a fully informed courier, since he was a courier of information that he knowingly related to diplomats and government officials. Karski became a courier who presented himself under several assumed names. He represented the Polish underground. Two of his assumed names included Wilhold and Kucharski. Karski was captured by the Gestapo and tortured. In captivity he attempted suicide but survived. He subsequently escaped during a prisoner transfer. After his escape he was again placed into service in the underground. Karski was allowed access to a concentration camp near Belzec, where he observed the organization of a mass murder. He eventually carried the news to President Roosevelt and other world leaders of his firsthand experience of entering the concentration camp. The camp where Karski entered practiced a different method of mass murder. By comparison it may have been crueler than that of the crematoria. Kasrski witnessed Jews being loaded onto train boxcars designed to haul livestock. A single car had a capacity for 8 horses. Into this single car up to 120 persons were crowded. Before the persons entered, the floor was covered with a thick layer of quicklime. This served the purpose of covering the stench of any captives who might die. It also burnt flesh upon contact, and the feet and flesh of many of the prisoners would have been exposed as soon as they entered the car. In this instance the train carried the prisoners to a destination where a mass grave had been dug for the victims’ remains. Prisoners were allowed to remain in the cars for three or four days until they died of natural causes, that is, they were allowed to die of starvation and exposure to other dying victims. Only after the prisoners were believed to be dead were the cars opened. Then the unit of the Sondercommandos would dispose of the bodies in huge bonfires. The remains were buried in the mass graves.26 Karski included details of this murderous operation in his reports to allied officials. Some government officials and planners may also count as resisters. They contributed to the effort by developing a societal plan for the reconstruction of post-war society. The Kreisau Circle led by Helmuth James von Molthe was a resistance group that aimed to deliver to the German people and the European community a constitutional alternative to

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totalitarianism. The Kreisau Circle developed in secret a comprehensive plan for a government that was intended to provide an alternative to Nazi’s rule. The group anticipated that the totalitarian state led by Hitler was doomed to self-destruction by its policies of expansion, by violence, and its oppression of its people. They foresaw a day when a non-totalitarian government would be needed, and they went on planning for that moment when they would give to Germany the governmental plan that would replace Nazism on “Day X.”27 If their plan could have been implemented, victims of the Holocaust would have been indirect beneficiaries of a government order that valued individual freedom and human rights. The intellectual planning of the Kreisau Circle was scholarly and comprehensive. They anticipated that the doomed Nazi regime would self-­ implode and produce a political vacuum that they were prepared to fill at a moment’s notice. If events went as they supposed, they could simply step forward unopposed at the opportune moment and offer their solution to the power vacuum that they foresaw. They were willing to organize a political coup as a catalyst to bring about this implosion of the Nazi order, and they took steps to have Hitler killed. The coup that they planned was delayed by weeks and months. Not until July 20, 1944, was an attempt made on Hitler’s life. The failure of that plot exposed the group and brought about their ruin, when the Nazis retaliated against the group. Members of the group count as resisters who valued the life of citizens above the lives of its leaders. The proposed government of the Kriesau Circle would have saved lives. It would have saved lives of soldiers caught up in the violence of war, and it would have saved the lives of citizens including those of Jews, Gypsies, and others. The saving of lives was a direct benefit but a deferred benefit, since the critical coup leading up to the transfer of power was not forthcoming. Of course, it could save no lives unless it was implemented. In retrospect the resistance offered by the Kreisau Circle proved to be a resistance in spirit but not in fact. In the weeks and months that transpired since the group was organized thousands of Jews along with others became victims of the Nazis’ genocide. If the group had succeeded in establishing its alternate government, the reprieve from Nazi terror would have come too late for the majority of the victims of the Holocaust. From a moral perspective it raises a question of the timeliness of intervention. While the Kriesau Circle planned, the Nazis committed mass murders; and the alternate government could not bring back the lives of countless thousands lost in the interlude.

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Allied troops acting as combatants under orders liberated persons in concentration camps incidentally. That is, the liberation of concentration camps was not the top military priority of Allied troops on the move in Poland and Germany. Jan Karski’s report to President Roosevelt confirmed information that was already known by the Allies. Nazis were known to be committing the mass murders of Jews, Roma, and others. Knowledge of these atrocities did not prompt an immediate and direct response. Instead, the liberation came about incidentally during the war campaign to subdue German troops and territory. An objector may argue that the inability of victims to organize and present a unified front was proof of their ineptness and inefficiency. In the objector’s view victims were constitutionally and practically incapable of offering a serious self-defense. The delay of resisters in successfully coming to the aid of victims could be cited as confirmation of their lack of strength to offer their own self-defense. Perpetrators may have seen victims as helpless and incapable of resisting, but the perception was based on more than one unjustified characterization of victims and misplaced explanations of why they did not succeed. Victims were characterized as weak or cowardly, but that objection simply aimed to support a false stereotype. If victims could have organized themselves into a unified front for resistance, they would have amassed less than one percent of the population. Individually many resisters demonstrated extraordinary moral fortitude in sabotaging or resisting the efforts of the perpetrators. They survived. They did not add to the count of the six million who were murdered. Without additional aid the victims may not have been able to halt the genocide that was unfolding. While one cannot ignore the vulnerability of the victims, it was not the victims who were obligated to halt the killing. Their efforts did contribute in significant ways to their survival and to the ultimately thwarting of the Nazis. Before we consider how heroism factored into resistance, we may pause to reconsider the rationale in repeating these historic accounts of resistance. Yes, Anne Frank, Leah Silversteen, and Jan Karski were victim resisters. Yes, they fought for their lives and the lives of victims. Yes, these are well known accounts of resistance. In a history of violence, it is important to see what options were open to resisters. Their acts of resistance demonstrate some of the live possibilities for resistance available to victims and bystanders. They remain a historic testimony to the fact that in the face of discrimination and dehumanization victims and bystanders are not altogether powerless. Victims and resisters can act, and they can make effective

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use of nonviolent resistance to halt the stages of genocidal violence. These live possibilities that resisters did exercise are a testimony to the acts of resistance many bystanders were liable for omitting.

Heroic Resistance that Dignifies Human Rights The perpetrators-victims-bystanders trope is both helpful and misleading for purposes of analyzing the resistance victims did offer to genocidal violence during the Holocaust. The historian Harold Goldberg suggests we view the responses as nuanced rather than resistance-or-collaboration responses. He writes, “The majority of Europeans did not choose collaboration or resistance, but something in-between—not cooperating with the Nazis but also not going to the mountains and joining a military unit.”28 Goldberg’s assessment that the responses of Europeans were nuanced seems correct. Thus, the majority to whom Goldberg refers may be viewed as bystanders. It is that ambivalence of both loyalties and actions that raises questions about the innocence of bystanders. In their inaction one can find both complicity with the perpetrators and support of the resistance. Whether moral praise or blame is to be associated with bystanders’ responses requires further analysis. Here we focus on the responses of the victims and rescuers in the face of oppression. Gilbert observes a vital statistic that should not be overlooked. In the early twentieth century about half a million Jews resided in Germany. One half million persons is a sizable number, but Jews in Germany comprised less than 1 percent of the population. The question of resistance assumes that the victims were in a position to resist. What was true in Germany is often repeated in other instances of genocide. The ethnic group targeted for genocidal violence in the Holocaust was outnumbered and outgunned. The fact that some individuals identify themselves as members of a minority group is not a justification for subjecting them to discrimination or violence. If they were to offer resistance as an organized body, their efforts would not go unnoticed, but it seems unlikely that their efforts would be sufficient to halt the violence of the perpetrators. A strategic show of force by victims who were resisters would not halt a genocide. If one or a handful of resisters could have mounted a decisive victory against the perpetrators such as the assassination of Hitler, the probability that the action could have halted the genocide still seems remote. The momentum of the perpetrators’ hatred would carry them forward. One may only speculate that someone like Heinrich Himmler

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would step into the leadership role of Hitler if Hitler had been assassinated. Given the disposition of the general public, such a show of force could fan the negative sentiments of the perpetrators to retaliate against the victims. Retaliation in most cases resulted in greater harm to the victims. Some have called attention to the noticeably small number of Nazis who oversaw Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. Only a token number of Nazis may have been present on-site to oversee hundreds of incarcerated persons in concentration camps or persons confined to ghettos. To fill the leadership gap individuals were chosen from the victims. These individuals were thoroughly coerced to do the bidding of the Nazis without questions. In the concentration camps the Nazis relied on Kapos, and in the ghettos the Nazis relied on the Judenrat. To the extent that these individuals were forced into action we may consider them to be victims whose coercion would excuse them. These were not participants in a Milgram experiment, but they were persons confronting a live enemy or looking down the barrel of a gun.29 Even if victim-resisters could mobilize themselves against the perpetrators in the confines of concentration camps, vast numbers of the military and sympathizers could be dispatched to come to the aid of Nazis who were threatened or under attack. This was amply demonstrated in the leveling of Warsaw that followed its uprising in 1944. At least three classifications of victims can be made—unwitting victims, knowing but unwilling victims, and knowing and willing victims. Likewise, we must understand that the danger to intended victims could be a general danger or it could be an immediate and imminent danger. In other words, Jews living in Germany in the early years after the Aryan laws were passed were generally at risk of suffering from genocidal violence, but the risk for Jews living in Berlin during a 1941 round-up exercise for gathering and deporting Jews to a killing camp was immediate and imminent. While genocidal victimization and the merits of resistance are not necessarily judged in light of war, the cloak of war may shape judgments about victimization and resistance. In a just war theory, combatants are supposed to be morally equivalent, and justice remains indifferent to combatants on one side or the other. In other words, combatants claim moral equivalence and may strike against enemy combatants with impunity. In an unjust war justice favors one side in actions against enemy combatants and belligerents. Hitler and the Nazis declared themselves to be engaged in a racial war against Jews, and they maintained the Jews had wronged the

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citizens of Germany. Thus, the Nazis saw themselves as being engaged in a civil war as well as a battle on more than one front. Onlookers from other nations saws Nazis as enemy combatants in an unjust war only when they considered Germany’s invasion of foreign territories like Poland. Meanwhile the internal, ideological and civil war against the Jews was largely ignored. One overlooked form of resistance that occurred in Warsaw, Lodz and other ghettos was the education of children. Within Jewish ghettos educating children was forbidden by law. In defiance of the law, schools were organized in the ghettos. Nechama Tec says, “In some of the ghettos, young people of various political groups offered lessons to children and lectured to adult audiences, though this was illegal.”30 Post-war diaries of children who lived in the ghettos report how valued the experience of school was. The adults who led the schools risked their lives to offer instruction, and the children receiving instruction placed their lives at risk too. The adults instructing Jewish students were not engaged in a self-­ serving activity. Instead, their resistance took the form of a benevolent activity that aimed to improve the lives of others though it placed them in mortal danger, hence it may be viewed as a supererogatory act. When critics and deniers report that the Jews cared so little for their life that they offered no resistance, the critics and deniers fail to recognize that underground schools were a significant form of resistance.

Assessing the Utility of Resistance Politicians, soldiers and partisans rarely calculate potential casualties as persons having intrinsic value. If they did see a single individual as having infinite worth, then the defense of war and state sanctioned violence would be moot. Instead, they make use of a utilitarian calculus. Even that calculus can go awry when enemies preparing for reprisals figure that one soldier’s life is worth that of seven civilians. Were victims’ and resisters’ efforts to defend the victims’ right to life vain efforts? Some resisted for the sake of self-preservation, and others as a group resisted for humanitarian or religious reasons. Individual defenses of a right to life are to be distinguished from joint or collective defenses of victims’ right to life. The collective defense of a people’s right to life by military intervention will be discussed later. The utility of individuals’

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resistance and the utility of collective efforts to defend victims’ right to life can be measured upon the basis of the likelihood of success. If you knew that you could mount a counterattack against the oppressors, and if you knew that the reprisals would be exponentially large, should you? That is an existential question and an ethical question. To answer the ethical question, we may consider the utility of the attempts. Victims who were courageous enough to offer resistance knew they were risking their lives. If they acted upon their inclinations to preserve life, they knew they could be executed. They knew that they also placed at risk the lives of their companions and their loved ones. Steps could be taken to minimize how many companions would be implicated in a single action. However, they could not shield the larger community from the vengeance of the perpetrators. The victims were outnumbered. Consider the efforts of the White Rose mentioned earlier. That group aimed to influence public opinion through its pamphlets. These subversive pamphlets aimed to expose the Nazis’ diabolical plots fueled by racism and hatred. Members of the organization were thoroughly convinced of the injustice of the Nazis’ practices, and they aimed to persuade the population that the Nazis were thugs and criminals. Their efforts may have been most effective during the early years of the Nazi administration, if they could have persuaded the majority not to follow the Nazis. Given the scale of their efforts and timing of their efforts, they offered only token resistance. Members of the group sacrificed their lives to make a minimal impact on the genocide that was happening. Some acts of resistance could not be linked to the larger community. Georg Elser’s attempt to kill Hitler by bombing the building where he was lecturing in Munich failed. Elser was not linked to a collection of rebels nor to the larger German population.31 Since he was working alone, his torture and his transfer to Sachsenhausen were fruitless. Finger pointing proved to be mere speculation. Blame for attacking Hitler could always be placed upon the Jews, but Himmler placed blame on the British this time.32 While the incident unnerved those who were working underground, there was no telltale evidence to lead the suspicious officials to their doorstep. Since Elser acted alone, his torture and his transfer to a concentration camp brought an end to the reprisals for his resistance. Reprisals for resistance were to be expected. Perpetrators would not allow their victims to mount resistance without feeling the brunt of retaliatory violence. However, perpetrators driven by malicious intent often choose to discourage resistance by making an example of the consequences

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of resistance. To that end the perpetrators would aim to give far more than they got, that is, they would aim to magnify the harm victims would suffer. The Nazis would often retaliate tenfold for every Nazi killed by a resister. Those who resisted could choose to do so individually or as part of a collective. Like-minded individuals driven by courage, a sense of revenge, or an unwillingness to suffer in silence banded together to offer pockets of resistance. Some would simply take a stand on their own against genocidal violence. Others who had military training and were not already captured may have found it easiest to organize themselves as underground resistance fighters. Those who chose to resist could anticipate a counterforce to neutralize their efforts. When there is a likelihood that there will be reprisals questions of utility should be raised. Two prominent cases shall illustrate the real threat of reprisals. The first is the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The second is the Ardeatine Caves Massacre. While some resistance patriots in Warsaw may have harbored hopes that allies would bolster their efforts against the Nazis, few believed they would eventually gain the upper hand against their aggressors. In the Warsaw uprising Jewish resisters chose to side with the Armia Krajowa (AK), that is the Polish Home Army that had gone underground. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto who collaborated with the AK and chose to fight back acted under no delusion that they would enjoy rescue or newfound release. They chose to fight rather than endure the aggression passively. Alexandra Richie writes, “ On 19 April 1943 a small group of Jews decided to fight back. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened not because the trapped fighters had any hope of defeating the Germans, but because they knew with certainty the fate that awaited them if they got on the trains. The Germans had left them a simple choice: either to die passively, or to die fighting. They chose the latter (6).

When calculating the utility of resistance for the preservation of dignity, the resisters must weigh the losses against the gains. Yet, the calculation cannot be that of a simple headcount. There is a qualitative dimension to the acts of resistance. Resisters could reclaim a sense of dignity that perpetrators denied them even if the perpetrators aimed to deny them their right to life. Consider how the Ardeatine Caves Massacre was intended to communicate to resisters that retaliation could be more brutal than passive compliance.33 In Rome 33 members of the SS Police Regimen were killed by

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resisters. In retaliation on March 24, 1944, under the command of SS Captain Eric Priebke and SS Captain Karl Hass a total of 355 prisoners were gathered at the Ardeatine Caves. Under the officer’s supervision prisoners were escorted into the cave in groups of five, made to kneel on the floor of the cave, and were there shot to death. When all 355 prisoners were murdered, an explosion was detonated to seal the mouth of the cave. The tenfold retaliation demonstrated the dehumanizing spirit of the Nazis. The disproportional retaliation of Nazis seeking revenge is a reminder of the injustice that had to be confronted in the Holocaust. Should the resisters in Rome have halted their operations rather than face the Nazis’ revenge? In the short term their operations did not preserve the dignity of others but resulted in a greater loss of life and dignity, but in the long term their operations aimed to uphold the dignity of those who were oppressed. For those resisters who were willing to sacrifice their own dignity and that of other collaborators for the greater good, it may have made sense to proceed with their operations.

The Practicality and Justice of Resistance Return to the questions posed: Why did the Jews not resist? Or why were Jews’ attempts to resist so ineffectual. There is an underlying ambiguity in the questions. Either the questioner blames Jews as a whole for their victimization or the questioner blames Jews individually for their victimization. Here we shall consider the idea of blaming Jews collectively for their victimization. On the one hand, it may make sense to speak of collective blame for the perpetrators. Perpetrators of genocide do experience a sense of solidarity that unifies them against their victims. They do embrace a unifying outlook regarding the victims. In other words, perpetrators adopt the us-­ versus-­ them viewpoint. In the Holocaust the Aryans and non-Aryans constituted the binary. Non-Aryans included not only Jews but also Roma, homosexuals, and others. This binary mindset is easily swayed by propaganda that denigrates the victims. The ideology that unifies the perpetrators fails to unify the victims. The victims do share a common experience of being the targets of genocidal violence. Thus, they become a conglomeration, but they do not constitute an aggregate, that is, a whole. They have commonality of experience as victims, but they are not necessarily unified by that commonality.

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The assumption that victims could resist as a whole assumes wrongly a critical solidarity of victims would allow them to act as a unified whole, a collective, and with a singular mind and purpose. For the victims in the Holocaust that was not true. Jews, Roma, the disabled, and homosexuals lacked that sort of unity to arise as a body and resist their oppressors. Pockets of Jews or Roma could organize themselves, but as a whole they could not. Partisans were able to unify themselves into small fighting units, and for that reason they can be viewed as a peculiar kind of soldier. In contrast, those who banded together within concentration camps to mount resistance efforts against their captors rarely met with success. Several factors ensured bands of victims in concentration camps had to act on their own, since they were unable to establish links with partisans or other sympathetic groups outside their camp. Victims took defensive measures to ensure that their captors could not identify the membership of the resister groups. If they were passing supplies such as gunpowder or arms, members of the supply line would not know more than one or two other contacts.34 Not infrequently a well-organized plan to stage an insurrection would be spoiled by a single informant. The resisters chose to safeguard against informants by disassociating themselves from other resisters. One person would drop off a supply like gunpowder at a prearranged site, and the person collecting the material would do so without contact with the first person. This enforced ignorance was intended to safeguard the larger group, if one member were captured and tortured.35 This protective measure simultaneously prevented the resisters from joining forces with other resisters outside the camps. While it would have been advantageous for persons in concentration camps to join forces with outside groups of resisters like partisans, this was not possible. Communication outside the camps was difficult, and those outside the camp were reluctant to join forces with resisters within concentration camps for campaigns they regarded as suicide missions. Some organized resistance campaigns from within concentration camps were more successful than others, but many met with failure. In a resistance campaign in Auschwitz between five hundred and six hundred inmates were killed, while the Nazis lost only three or four guards.36 It was assumed earlier that mere existence or basic acts intended to promote life and wellbeing were sufficient to defend one’s right to life. Acts of resistance by rescuers were suggested to be supererogatory acts. Acts of resistance identified as supererogatory were assumed to be acts

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undertaken by resisters in defense of the lives of others. One is thought to be going above and beyond a basic defense of one’s right to life. Here a paradox arises. While some acts of resistance are undertaken to preserve the life of the resister along with that of the victims, other acts of resistance posed a greater risk of loss of life for the resister. If the dignity of the resister is sacrificed to uphold the dignity of others, then the resister may be sacrificing his or her dignity for that of another. One could be acting as a martyr in the hope that loss of a single life would result in the preservation of many lives. Ghetto resisters recognized that they were under a slow-death sentence already, and their view of suicide missions took that into account. Self-determination shall be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Self-sacrificial acts of resistance challenge the notion that one is going above and beyond one’s duty. In this ethical transformation one surrenders their own dignity to preserve a dignity of others. The Jew, the Gypsy, the homosexual, or other victims that chose to resist genocidal violence did so as individuals rather than as a single collective. Even when they banded together to form clutches of resisters, they did not become a single collective rising up to defend themselves. Given the assumption that they were acting individually their behavior could be analyzed in terms of satisfying a practical syllogism: these victims of genocidal violence whom I can aid are persons, persons have dignity that deserves respect, therefore, these victims whom I can aid have dignity that deserves respect. Earlier it was asserted that a defense of victims’ dignity did not require that they performed acts of resistance. Their claim on dignity was not thought to be lacking if they did not act as a resister. The victim who does not choose to resist could say to perpetrators, “I am a victim, I am being wronged, and I am not obliged to do anything extraordinary to defend my right. “ Just war theory provides a mechanism to arrive at a judgement about the justice of actors’ behavior in wartime. The theory would defend the action of some individuals during war as just acts providing that the conditions are met to qualify the war as just. Here we are interested in analyzing the action of victims who resisted. In what way could their behavior be justified or condemned? War proceeds without necessarily following the protocol of just war theory. However, just war theory provides us with a schema for identifying actors in wartime. The most basic division of actors in war is that of soldiers and civilians. Soldiers can be divided into combatants and non-­ combatants. In just war theory soldiers are thought to be morally

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equivalent unless there are circumstances that dictate otherwise. Combatants may be further divided depending on the orders they are following and the justice or injustice of the war. In war civilians or non-soldiers can be victims of war. As victims these individuals become the targets of violence that may include murder. Resistance can take various forms such as flight or avoidance; simple self-­ defense; passive, non-violent resistance; or violent resistance. Simple self-­ defense may involve violence that is reflexive. Both passive non-violent resistance and violent resistance are indicative of a decision made by the potential victim about the role he or she will play in the conflict. The victim who chooses to respond with non-violent resistance has chosen pacifism as the just response to violence. In contrast, the victim who chooses to respond with violent resistance intentionally chooses to meet deadly force with deadly force. That individual must be prepared to justify killing if the circumstances warrant. Resistance fighters who band together with rebels may come from the mass of civilians rather than the ranks of the military, but their endorsement of violence and their collective action creates of an ad hoc military unit. Potential victims who chose to resist genocidal violence have been the focus of this study. Many who would count as victim-resisters were acting to evade, halt, or even retaliate against violence that would otherwise be directed at them. When this resistance provided an escape or a cover for others it was thought to qualify as a supererogatory act. That is to be distinguished from the resistance offered by partisans. Before they joined themselves to a collective of partisans, resisters may have been performing acts of resistance that would qualify as supererogatory acts. Their decision to join themselves to a collective identifies a transition in the duties that they choose to fulfill. While they acted independently as resisters, they were fulfilling an imperfect duty that required action beyond that needed for survival: I ought to act in such a way that the untoward behavior of my enemies is neutralized. By joining a paramilitary group, the resister takes up a new imperative as a member of the group: We ought to act in such a way that we bring about the cessation of violence and bring the perpetrators to justice. Arguably partisans joining themselves to a collective have ceased to act as individual resisters and thereby ceased to act strictly as non-combatants. In a sense they have become soldiers even if they cannot lay claim to allegiance to a particular state. It becomes the duty of the partisan to resist and fight wrongful violence, and in this view their resistance would no longer qualify as a supererogatory act.

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Undeniably partisans qualified as resisters. The question of why victims did not resist is directed at both partisans and non-partisans, and the implicit assumption is that victims were not partisans. Partisans filled the stereotypical roles of resisters who were armed and organized. A sizable number of partisans secreted themselves in the forests of Poland and surrounds. Partisans provided ostensible evidence that some fought back, but their efforts were severely limited. To the undiscerning the heroic efforts of partisans seemed to confirm the lie that most Jews and aliens willingly accepted their role as victims. This false expectation was the result of mistaken thinking about what acts should count as resistance and the assumption that resisters were fighting Nazi perpetrators only and not sympathizers such as some Russian partisans. Partisans formed themselves into fighting collectives over time. One, two, and five individuals already fleeing from violence would band together. Other victims would connect and join these few individuals. Eventually the mass of resisters would grow until it constituted a virtual paramilitary unit. Partisans were not part of a standing army nor a militia that were gathered with forethought. In her book, Resistance, Nechama Tec observes that the development of partisan units was a process requiring several steps.37 They had to join together and organize themselves into a collective designed to resist the violence aimed at them. Many began as unarmed civilians in flight from the violence. Their arms and training had to be acquired after they had flown from the threat of violence. Basic to the operation of partisan groups was the aims of the group’s leadership. Leadership within the group had to decide if their resistance would prioritize retribution or the rescue of the greatest number.38 The decision to adopt one aim or the other was a significant moral decision. Those that prioritized retribution saw themselves as potential martyrs prepared to sacrifice their lives as a witness or for the greater good. Those that prioritized the rescue of the greatest number eschewed violence when possible. Partisans could not necessarily expect that the enemies of their enemies were their allies. Germans would see Jewish partisans as their intended victims, but Polish underground soldiers would not necessarily see Jewish partisans as their allies. The antisemitism that targeted Jews was not confined to the German nation. It was a wide-spread and longstanding regional prejudice. Partisans willing to defend Jews had to find their allies where they could or had to change the thinking of some of the enemies of their enemies. Neither prospect was an easy sale.

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While many partisans condemned genocidal violence, they condoned the use of violence to resist violence. In other words, they condoned killing to halt killing. Since partisans were organized, armed, and prepared to kill they constituted a de facto military group. Once they owed allegiance to their own state, but that state had betrayed them. They were stateless persons bearing arms in the view of the perpetrators. Providing that they aimed their resistance at soldiers or military personnel, moral judges and military tribunals could regard their violent resistance as fair play given the moral equivalence of combatants.

Conclusion The path to violent resistance taken by partisans may be the most direct response. Those who have chosen to mount a campaign of violent resistance have bypassed an option that may appear to be impractical to the resister, that is, the option of either nonviolent resistance or pacifism. Yet, the possibility that nonviolent resistance could be mounted by individuals who were partisans or intended victims is largely overlooked. Sabotage by any other name is resistance. Even when it is violent, it is not necessarily life threatening. In countless instances victims seized the opportunity to sabotage the genocidal violence of the perpetrators by simple acts. Workers in munitions plants could easily sabotage war efforts by making faulty ammunition. The education of children in a ghetto was a type of sabotage, but it did not bring about the death of perpetrators. The denier who claims that Jews did not value their lives fails to see these methods of resistance as ways that Jews and victims did uphold their dignity. Victims could offer resistance without resorting to violence, and in many instances nonviolent resistance was the preferred response of victims. Why? Those who intentionally choose nonviolent resistance or pacifism understand that one who meets violence with violence may or may not neutralize the violence. In the meantime, meeting violence with violence tends to amplify the violence. Pacifists choose non-violence both because they believe it is right and because they believe it can better bring violence to a halt. Those who choose nonviolence aim to avoid conflict that kills. Resistance can manifest itself as simple acts that aim to promote life and wellbeing. Resistance is not necessarily violent. When the means of resistance is violence, it raises questions about the ends and values of the resisters.

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This chapter addresses the charge that Jews were willing or powerless victims. The charge appears to be a thinly veiled type of denial consistent with antisemitism and the negative stereotyping of Jews. The many acts of resistance discussed in this chapter prove the charge to be a hasty generalization. Many Jews and their sympathizers did resist the reign of terror. Some resisted by force and others chose a path of nonviolent resistance. An antisemite may contend that many of the cases described here would not count as resistance. This objection may arise from the notion that resistance would take the form of an armed conflict where there is an exchange of shots fired. While that counts as resistance, we must consider resistance in light of the broader definition of genocide. Genocide aims to eradicate an ethnic group of people. Killing is not the sole means of eliminating people. Denying them the ability to reproduce offspring or denying them the opportunity to educate their youth in the ways of their ancestors are also means of eradicating an ethnic group of people. The education of young Jews in ghettos was no exchange of gunfire, but it was an effort to keep alive a new generation of people along with their social and religious traditions. Thus, it was one of many methods of nonviolent resistance that aimed to uphold the dignity of the victims and resisters in the face of its denial by perpetrators.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the moral options open to victims who were able to resist see my chapter, “The Moral Pathway Forward for Resisters in a Genocide,” in Peace and Hope in Dark Times, edited by Andrew Fila and Sahar Heydarifard. (Brill: 2023). 2. Deborah Lipstadt, https://youtu.be/0ztdofPc8Rw. 3. Alexander Hinton posed this question during the USHMM seminar, “Good, Evil, and the Grey Zone: Religion’s Role in Genocide from the Holocaust to ISIS,” June 27–July 1, 2016. 4. Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, 43. 5. Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis. Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2019), 106. 6. Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, 118. 7. Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, 119. 8. Ernest Klee, “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Edited by Ernest Klee et  al., 1st American ed. (Detroit, Michigan: Free Press, 1991), 63. 9. Klee, The Good Old Days, 72.

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10. For an extended discussion of the minimalist account of a defense of the right to life see my chapter, “The Moral Pathway Forward for Resisters in a Genocide” in Peace and Dark Times, edited by Andrew Filia (Netherlands: Brill, 2023). 11. Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant, The Daughter of Auschwitz (New York: Hanover Square Press, 2022), 166. 12. See Deuteronomy 22: 23–27. 13. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Doubleday, 1993). 14. Anne Frank, 16. 15. Anne Frank, 38. 16. Anne Frank, 89. 17. Anne Frank, 207. 18. Rod Gragg, My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust (New York: Center Street, 2017), 70–72. 19. Gragg, My Brother’s Keeper, 76–79. 20. Gragg, My Brother’s Keeper, 92–100. 21. Thomas and Lewis, Defying Hitler, 312. 22. Thomas and Lewis, Defying Hitler, 312. 23. Nechama Tec, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 161–167. 24. Tec, Resistance, 167–171. 25. Tec, Resistance, 167. 26. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: my report to the world (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 330. 27. Hans Mommsen, Alternatives to Hitler: German resistance under the Third Reich (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 42, 137. 28. Harold Goldberg, Daily Life in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Santa Barbara, California, Greenwood: 2019), 155. 29. In response to the historic Milgram experiments see my note 13 in Chap. 1. 30. Tec, Resistance, 58. 31. Thomas and Lewis, Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule, 135. 32. Thomas and Lewis, Defying Hitler, 136. 33. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/article/ardeatine-­caves-­massacre. 34. Tec, Resistance, 131. 35. Tec, Resistance, 131. 36. Tec, Resistance, 136. 37. Tec, Resistance, 5. 38. Tec, Resistance, 121.

CHAPTER 9

The Case of the Muselmänner: A Study in the Loss and Reclamation of Dignity

Introduction Victims of genocidal violence like the Muselmänner test our notions of dignity. In practice it is not altogether clear if respect of dignity is deserved, earned, or to be granted. In this chapter we shall see how perpetrators have set in motion a plan to incrementally deny victims their dignity as they impose on victims an irreversible slow-death sentence. In Chap. 7 we were introduced to Joel Feinberg’s notion of dignity for bearers of rights, and we shall again invoke this notion of dignity of persons who are holders of rights. Using the little autonomy that remains some victims choose suicide. We consider the ethical implications of that move. For other persons with the fortitude of will choosing a hopeful outlook would provide a defense of their right to be treated with dignity. Who were the Muselmänner? Historically they were victims of genocidal violence during the Holocaust. One finds them described in the writings of Holocaust survivors such as Tova Friedman, Primo Levi, and Sam Pivnik. Their tale of the loss and reclamation of dignity shall occupy us in this chapter. Not only do they provide philosophical insight into our notion of dignity, but they also provide a moral lesson in the consequences of rights deprivation. Since programs of forced poverty can propel persons into similar dire circumstances where death is a present danger, they

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provide a lesson in how injustice can harm and kill people deprived of their dignity.

How the Dignified Should be Treated In his 1785 work, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant said, “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”1 This reformulation of the categorical imperative is widely recognized as the respect of persons principle. Viewed in forensic terms it refers to two agents, namely, a defendant and a perpetrator. The defendant in virtue of his or her humanity has dignity. In practice the perpetrator ought to affirm the dignity of the defendant, but the perpetrator can in practice deny the dignity of the defendant. Having dignity like having rationality may be a property of the defendant. I shall not presume to offer a thorough analysis of Kant’s view, but I observe that in Kant’s view humans have intrinsic worth, that is, dignity. If intrinsic worth is a non-contingent property, and if one’s dignity simply is one’s intrinsic worth, then I suppose that one cannot lose his or her dignity nor can that dignity be diminished. To forestall further debate I shall call that a Platonic notion of dignity. The Kantian imperative dictates how a perpetrator ought to treat one who has Platonic dignity, and respectable treatment ought to be consistent with the dignity of one having intrinsic worth. Dehumanizing treatment by the Nazi perpetrators toward victims failed to rise to the level of fulfillment of one’s duty. Why would Nazis care? They would not, insofar as they saw only themselves as persons with intrinsic worth based on their exclusive ethnicity. Ironically, this lack of care points to a vice of inhuman cruelty within the perpetrators rather than the victims. With good reason some thinkers have regarded the notion of dignity as a slippery term. In his book, Dignity, Michael Rosen has identified no less than four ways that an individual may be said to have dignity. Three ways of understanding dignity are dignity as status, dignity as intrinsic value, and dignity as demeanor.2 Kant understood dignity as one’s having intrinsic value. Rosen points to a fourth understanding in Joel Feinberg’s notion that dignity is respect-as-observance of another’s rights. Rosen says, “If Feinberg is right and ‘respect-as-observance’ is what respecting human dignity involves, then invoking the duty to respect human dignity doesn’t identify or justify human rights; in fact, it presupposes their existence.”3 I take it to be the case that someone who has a negative right to dignity has

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a right to be treated by another with dignity. The fourth sense of dignity seems to capture the possibility that others, that is, perpetrators, may deny the defendant’s dignity. I do not suppose that this fourth sense of dignity is applied unilaterally. Instead, I suppose reliance on other notions of dignity may become the occasion for a loss of the dignity of some. How so? Return to the second view of dignity, the intrinsic view of dignity. On that view all persons have dignity. Having intrinsic worth as one’s dignity guarantees that it cannot be taken or denied. Another may take a person’s property, goods, and so on, but no one can take a person’s dignity. The claim that all persons have dignity is a categorical proposition. That categorical proposition can easily be modified to become a hypothetical proposition. In other words, the categorical imperative to treat all humanity as an end can be degraded into an exclusionary imperative to treat only some of humanity as an end. If some suffer from undignified treatment and others do not, it may point to a diabolical dehumanization. A multi-­ dimensional model of dehumanization can be wielded by a few to exclude others from humanity. Nick Haslam observed, “instances of dehumanization vary in degrees of typicality, and there is no bright line separating ‘true’ dehumanization from other forms of humanness denial.”4 For example, the Nazis were eager to assert the intrinsic dignity of some persons: All Aryan persons have dignity. For Nazis this was a categorical proposition that offered a metaphysical excuse for their exclusive respect of Aryans. Non-Aryans could be treated in an undignified manner in theory since they lacked dignity; and in practice the dignity of non-Aryans might be compromised. The problem that denial of dignity poses for some persons is illustrated by the plight of the Muselmänner.

Who the Muselmänner Were Genocidal killing is an outright denial of an individual’s right to life. I suppose that constitutes a denial of an individual’s dignity, though one could argue in Epicurean fashion that only insofar as one is living does one have dignity. In that view no harm accrues post-mortem, and the dead cannot suffer nor claim a loss of dignity. I shall not here attempt to defend the notion of post-mortem harms to rebuttal the Epicurean view. Much genocidal killing seems to have been as swift as it was merciless. Mass killing with bullets in some precincts of Poland and killing by machete blows in Rwanda brought about swift death. Some persons killed by poison gas in Auschwitz and elsewhere may have had to suffer for several

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minutes before the poison gas, Zyklon B, brought about their death. The Muselmänner who are the focus of this study were subjected to a slow death. The Nazis’ “Final Solution” was a plan intended to rid Germany of the Jews. Ever careful to avoid public censure the Nazis used a veiled language to identify the means to kill as many Jews as possible. What should not go unnoticed in the Final Solution is the reference to “elimination by natural causes.” This points to the slow and systemic killing of Jews and others by natural means such as starvation and overexertion. Starvation and extreme fatigue do kill. The Nazis’ “Final Solution” says, In the course of the final solution and under appropriate leadership, the Jews should be put to work in the East. In large, single-sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately… 5

In his book, Survivor, Sam Pivnik describes a peculiar group of individuals who appear in the accounts of the Holocaust—the Muselmänner.6 While the Nazis did target specific groups of people like Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals for persecution, torture, or killing in the Holocaust, the Muselmänner were not a specific ethnic group. Instead, they were a collection of all victims who became so emaciated by the rigors of life in ghettos or concentration camps that they were near death. Their condition was the result of exposure to inclement weather, slow starvation, and excess physical exertion. Pivnik said, Next time you see liberation photographs of the camps taken by disbelieving British, Russian and American soldiers and the Red Cross, look at the state of the survivors. They look like walking skeletons, the living dead; many of them were so far gone they didn’t make it even after liberation and their photographs are all that we have of them. We called such living corpses Muselmänner, Muslims, and to this day I don’t know why. Perhaps newsreels in cinemas before the war showed starving people in India, I don’t know. If you became a Muselmänn, you’d probably die…7

Transport to concentration camps in cattle cars brought about the death of some of the weakest individuals. Once the transports were unloaded the selection process began in Auschwitz to send the weak and

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dying directly to the gas chambers and crematoria. The remainder were expected to work for their captors. Those who lacked exceptional skills that could serve the Nazis were subjected to hard labor. They often succumbed to this regimen of over exertion. Pivnik said, “ the unskilled workers around us were dropping like flies that spring. I watched them day after day, turning into Muselmänner in front of us, their bones sticking though their jackets and trousers, their faces pinched and drawn. They didn’t get enough food, enough rest or enough medical treatment and yet they were expected to carry the heavy bags of cement and loads of bricks. “8

Pivnik feared he was becoming a Muselmänner toward the end of the “Death March,” when Nazis forced prisoners out of Auschwitz to avoid capture by allied troops.9 Having seen how a robust athlete who entered camp as a healthy man was reduced to a walking corpse, Pivnik knew the same fate could be his.10 Pivnik was one of the rare survivors who started as a resident of a ghetto in Poland, was transported to Auschwitz, and then was send on the “death march” to avoid Russian troops who were invading the area. Disregard for basic human needs had begun in the ghetto. He reports, “in Warsaw the daily calorie intake for Jews was 300, at a time when for Poles it was 634 and for Germans 2,310.”11 In the ghettos caloric deprivation could be offset by black-market bartering, but in the concentration camps opportunities to acquire additional food were rare. Kapos, that is, the Jews appointed as supervisors, who were responsible for distribution of food supplies, consumed the goods and rations or sold them. The Muselmänner represent individuals whose needs were slowly and systematically denied. Upon entering a concentration camp, individuals were stripped, shaved, and marked with a tell-tale tattoo. The need for safety and mobility was denied when individuals were confined to ghettos or barracks. Day after day they were fed scant rations of food that were inadequate. Day after day they were expected to exert themselves in physical labor that was exhausting while exposing themselves to inclement weather. They were denied their basic needs for survival so that they were placed on the brink of death. Primo Levi said, “Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of [Auschwitz]… One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to

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call their death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”12

Denial of Needs and Deprivation of Dignity Having needs is a universally recognizable condition of humanity. Abraham Maslow suggested that the needs of individuals fall into five categories: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, self-esteem need, and self-actualization need.13 The most basic of these needs are the physiological needs for food, water, shelter, warmth. The physiological and safety needs are tangible needs. The other needs of belonging, self-­ esteem and self-actualization are social or psychological needs. Needs are conditions that can be denied partially or completely. I shall suggest that if one has a right to be treated with dignity, then one has a right to satisfy his or her basic needs. I take the satisfaction of needs to be a sufficient and non-necessary condition for having dignity. So, denial of an individual’s right to satisfy his or her basic needs entails a denial of an individual’s dignity. Like so many persons entering Auschwitz Pivnik was met by a man wearing grey doeskin gloves. With a flick of a finger, he separated persons coming from rail cars into workers and non-workers. The man was Joseph Mengele.14 The line for the non-workers was the line leading directly to the gas chambers and the crematoria. Those who were saved for work and those who were sentenced to death were all denied their basic needs for survival and security. Genocide is an affront to individual’s claim to have dignity. The swift killing that happens in full-blown genocide puts an end to individuals’ lives and thereby their dignity. By comparison, the slow and measured deprivation of the necessities of life was an assault upon the basic needs of individuals that produced the same outcome—denial of dignity and death. While I may see in Levi’s description of the Muselmänner a human brought to the brink of death, scholars like Emil Fackenheim and David Patterson see something more. I have observed that any victims could enter the ranks of the Muselmänner, and in that observation I am surely correct. What Fackenheim and Patterson recognize is that the Muselmänner appear differently to the Jews who are the majority of the persons who became Muselmänner. When Levi looked upon these persons, he did not find a person looking back. Levi describes them as “non-men who march

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and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer.”15 Unless I am mistaken Fackenheim and Patterson see in Levi’s description an existential encounter with a transformed self. Under normal circumstances if Levi were to gaze upon another human, the gaze could be reciprocated. Levi could gaze upon the Muselmänner, but there would be no expectation that his gaze would be returned. Why? Something had happened to these victims that should happen to no human, and that is the deadening within of that characteristic Levi calls the “divine spark.” Patterson says, “Transforming the Jew into a creature ‘too empty to really suffer,’ the Nazis robs him even of his suffering—and of his death.”16 It seems clear that the Nazis saw the Muselmänner as soulless entities. To the Nazis they were objects, not subjects. Speaking metaphorically these victims were valuable only insofar as their lives could be used to grease the Nazis’ machinery for world domination. Patterson observes, “Three key points in Levi’s exposition on the Muselmann are the Muselmann’s loss of a past, his loss of words, and his loss of presence.”17 These victims were cut off from a history that would otherwise validate their existence. These victims lacked the energy reserves to cry out, and even if they did cry out their cries would be unheard. These victims had been robbed of their sense of presence, and they had ceased to be counted in ethical deliberations. Levi was a survivor. Unlike so many of the Muselmänner he was able to recollect the days when his dignity was compromised, and his humanity was in jeopardy. Yet, he reclaimed his subjective and intersubjective self, while most Muselmänner never lived to experience that recovery of a sense of self. Levi said, “Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.”18 The respect of persons principle prescribes that one should treat humanity as an end and never as a means only. Treatment reflects how one values a person or even how a one values himself or herself. Treatment assumes worth. Pivnik was a human with a basic right to life, but he was not treated as one having dignity. In the months he spent in the ghetto and concentration camp he was incarcerated, raped, starved, flogged, overworked, exposed to inclement weather, and coerced into killing a fellow prisoner. If the reader believes that there is a disconnect between the Nazis campaign of forced starvation and impoverished living conditions today, the author invites the reader to reconsider. The Nazis placed victims in living

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conditions that mimicked extreme poverty. Food deserts in poor, underserved Brown and Black communities may be a sign that minority persons are being subject to undignified and potentially lethal treatment.

Measured Satisfaction of Needs for the Reclamation of Dignity Having Platonic dignity is a zero-sum game—one has it, or one does not. When the categorical notion suffers degradation to become a hypothetical notion serving a few, others can be treated as if they had no dignity. Nazi perpetrators forced victims to defend their right to life to the extent that was possible and thereby uphold their dignity even as it was being denied. A person can defend his or her dignity objectively and subjectively. Defense of one’s dignity in the face of genocidal violence may take the form of flight, passive resistance, active resistance, suicide, or the choice to hope. The first three responses represent objective ways to defend one’s dignity. For the most part flight and active, violent resistance were not live possibilities for the Muselmänner. The two remaining live possibilities of defending one’s dignity open to Muselmänner were suicide and the development of hope, and these shall be discussed in greater length. The suicide rate of Jews in the nineteenth century is largely forgotten as a significant contribution to the total deaths occurring in the Holocaust. In his book, Suicide in the Holocaust, David Lester reviews the statistics and circumstances associated with the suicide of Jews in Germany in the twentieth century. He said, “In Germany in October 1941, many German Jews were sent to the ghetto in Lod, Poland. Some 1,200 committed suicide.”19 In concentration camps like Auschwitz suicides were estimated to be 25,000 per 100,000 per year.20 Many of those who committed suicide in concentration camps shall remain as nameless as those who were killed by bullets or by poison gas. Notables committing suicide during this era include philosopher Walter Benjamin and author Kurt Tucholsky. Why would you end your life if you were living under a death threat? Motives of suicides in ghettos and concentration camps were mixed. Some killed themselves for the same reasons persons commit suicide today such as receipt of bad news, depression, or lack of hope. Emile Durkheim would classify these instances as fatalistic suicides.21 Perhaps suicide as “resistance enchained” best describes the suicide open to the Muselmänner.22 Their suicide would not count as symbolic resistance or polemic resistance.

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Those living close to death as the Muselmänner could simply resign themselves to succumb to the lethal forces already gnawing at their existence. Or in a final effort to resist they could actively intervene to bring their life to an end. A significant number of individuals chose to commit suicide rather than become a victim of genocidal violence. In the Kantian view of dignity as intrinsic worth a suicide would be a denial of one’s dignity, a self-contradiction. In contrast, Jean Amery, a Holocaust survivor, identifies some acts of suicide as a defense of the individuals’ dignity. Amery contends that dignity requires social recognition, and this is consistent with Rosen’s fourth sense of dignity. In Amery’s view if others fail to recognize one’s dignity, then one lacks dignity. Amery supposed one can defend against that denial by acting in a way that brings about a recognition of one’s dignity. In that view suicide would be seen as an act that calls for the recognition of one’s freedom. Tzvetan Todorov summarizes Amery’s view of suicide by saying, “Even in places where murder is a daily occurrence, suicide, in and of itself, implies greater freedom. By committing suicide, one alters the course of events—if only for the last time in one’s life—instead of simply reacting to them.”23 Consider the case of Mala Zimetbaum. Zimetbaum escaped from Auschwitz only to be recaptured. When she refused to disclose who her accomplices were, she was sentenced to be killed by hanging. As she was being positioned on the gallows, she acted decisively to kill herself by slashing her wrists. The guards who proved powerless to halt her premature death said that she was attempting to be a heroine.24 One can only suppose that she reasoned as follows: “If I allow the Nazis to kill me by hanging, then I allow them to deny my dignity; but if I kill myself by suicide, I affirm my dignity.” Her suicide was the means to the end of heroism, and an undignified act was committed for a dignified end. In the Kantian view she would have sacrificed her dignity. In the dignity-as-­ respect-of-rights view, she affirmed her dignity. Todorov’s said, “Dignity then becomes the capacity to satisfy through one’s actions, criteria that one has internalized.”25 In other words, an internal decision without action would fall short of a dignified act. Victor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl discussed the significance of hope. Frankl said, “the sort of person the prisoner becomes was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him— mentally and spiritually.”26 Frankl recognized he could not change his

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circumstances, but he could change his attitude toward them. He could laugh at the meager servings of thin soup, and he could dream of soup on a future day with vegetables taken from the bottom of the pot.27 In other words, Frankl could choose hope. Frankl said, “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”28 Frankl’s decision to hope did not change the rations he was given nor his exposure to inclement weather. It did provide the internal fortitude to withstand the assault on his dignity. His decision to hope was his assertion of his right to be treated with dignity. The loss of hope or the claim of hope remained in the subjective power of victims in the Holocaust including the Muselmänner. It points to the way that one’s dignity remained within the power of choice. Loss of hope was a surrender of dignity, since the person that lost hope brought to a halt the defense of his or her right to life. The decision to claim hope was a subjective defense of one’s dignity.

Conclusion In their genocidal campaign to remake Germany the Nazis dehumanized Jews and others. Having determined that these individuals lacked the humanness to command dignified treatment they could deny the needs of these individuals without hesitation. Though the Muselmänner had little opportunity to defend their right to be treated with dignity, they retained some ability to act objectively or subjectively to assert their right to be treated with dignity. Objectively they could choose to end their life, or subjectively they could choose to live with hope. In death or in life those who chose to defend their dignity rose above the undignified treatment they suffered under their oppressors. For my part I suppose the choice to hope to be the better choice to defend one’s right to dignity. In Chap. 2 I observed that legalized denial of persons’ rights was creating a slippery slope that ends in disaster. A reader understandably was skeptical of that argument. With the additional historical account of the Muselmänner we can see how this is not an empty claim. Jews and other minorities in both ghettos and concentration camps were systematically deprived of the rights that would allow human flourishing. Specifically, they were denied freedom of movement, denied the opportunity to rest after physical over exertion, and increasingly denied access to food and

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drink. Persons were not born as Muselmänner, they were made such through oppression. They were worked and starved to death. Thus, in the case of the Muselmänner Stanton’s stage nine of genocide—the stage of extermination—is reached not through a show of force but by racial oppression. These forms of racial oppression were unrestrained and overt in Nazi Germany, and Nazis aimed to eliminate the victims. This elimination process was that of slow death. In the United States after the civil war racial oppression of Black persons was not carried out as overtly as the Nazis’ campaign of terror; but ghettos, segregation and Jim Crow laws, and militant policing all denied Black persons their rightful human dignity. We can see the case of the Muselmänner as a parable of the consequences of racial oppression that remains unaddressed and unrestrained. Justice that would uphold human dignity demands that racial oppression be identified as such and halted as early as possible. Unchecked racial oppression can gain momentum on a trajectory toward a foreseeable end, the end of the murder of victims.

Notes 1. Kant, Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985), 54. 2. Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012), 40. 3. Rosen, Dignity, 57. 4. Paul G. Bain, et al., editors. Humanness and Dehumanization (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), 45. 5. Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2002), 184. Italics mine. 6. Sam Pivnik, Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Flight for Freedom (New York: St. Martin Press, 2012). 7. Pivnik, Survivor, 110. 8. Pivnik, Survivor, 164. 9. Pivnik, Survivor, 191. 10. Pivnik, Survivor, 128. 11. Pivnik, Survivor, 71. 12. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. 13. See Sam McLeod’s article, “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. https://www. simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#gsc.tab=0. 14. Pivnik, Survivor, 121.

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15. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. 16. David Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006), 149. 17. Patterson, Open Wounds, 150. 18. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 172. 19. David Lester, Suicide in the Holocaust (Hauppauge, New  York: Nova Science, 2005), 2. 20. Lester, Suicide in the Holocaust, 119. 21. Lester, Suicide in the Holocaust, 105. 22. Lester, Suicide in the Holocaust, 116. 23. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, 1st American ed. (New York: Metropolitan books, 1996), 63. 24. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 64. 25. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 65. 26. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 4th ed. (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1992), 105. 27. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 69. 28. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 117.

CHAPTER 10

Ethical Gray Zones in Genocidal Killing Camps

Introduction This chapter takes the readers inside the ghettos and concentration camps to consider the artificial moral conditions imposed upon victims. Victims were denied a role in the ethical community of the perpetrators. They are denied ethical parity with perpetrators. 1 Thus, there was no recognized universal moral realm but only subordinate ethical spheres of existence. In the ghettos and in the concentration camps victims were forced to act in unnatural and unethical ways. While they were responsible for their actions, the victims were operating under duress and coercion. Those who created the ethical grey zones were doubly responsible for the artificial conditions they created to exterminate victims. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi described much of his life in Auschwitz as life in a gray zone. The very name, gray zone, connotes a place of ambiguity where sharp social and moral distinctions are blurred. To be in an ethical gray zone is to be in a place where black-and-white ethical distinctions are difficult to make. In this study we shall consider the emergence of ethical gray zones, entrapment in the gray zone, ethics in the gray zone, and escape from the gray zone. Duress is typically considered to be a mitigating excuse when responsibility for one’s moral behavior is appraised. Yet, duress may be asserted in manifold ways. As Larry May points out, the soldier in the theater of war

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may be under duress when a gun is placed to the soldier’s head, or the soldier may be under duress when given an order by a superior officer.2 The typical wisdom is that the first instance of duress with the gun-pressed-­ to-the-temple robs the soldier of freedom to do otherwise, while the second instance of duress of standing orders in a field of combat may or may not rob the soldier of freedom to do otherwise. The power of the orders may dissipate and be remote or imagined, whereas the gun-pressed-to-­ the-temple duress in the field of combat is real and imminent. The ethical gray zones created by genocide span both extremes. The actors’ capture and confinement transform their moral choices in the situation, since they are under constant duress.

The Emergence of Ethical Gray Zones In his book, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi discusses the ambiguities of life as a concentration camp prisoner in a chapter titled “The Gray Zone.” Privilege and power play important roles in Levi’s recollections of the prisoner’s life. Slight privileges such as a drink of water or possession of a cup could be the means of survival for one prisoner rather than another. These disparities are linked to the distribution of power within an ethical gray zone. In a totalitarian state the centralization of power ensures that the delegation of power is confined to a few, while others are stripped of their power. In the Lager, that is, within the concentration camp, power was in the hands of the Kapo. Levi says, the Lager, on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics, reproduced the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state, in which all power is invested from above and control from below is almost impossible. But this ‘almost’ is important: never has there existed a state that was really ‘totalitarian’ from this point of view…Only in the Lager was the restrain from below non-existent and the power of these small satraps absolute.3

Elsewhere we discuss Raul Wallenberg’s trifold distinction between actors in genocide—perpetrators, victims, bystanders. Arguably rescuers may be added to the list. I have maintained that these labels identify actors when the genocidal process is well advanced. It also seems likely that these titles misrepresent the actors in some instances. Through their actions some moral agents become perpetrators or rescuers. Similarly, through their inability to act some moral agents become victims, while others

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become bystanders through their inaction. When victims perpetrate violence upon other victims in the gray zones, they become perpetrators. Hence, some are better described as victim-perpetrators or victim-resisters. Social dominance theory suggests that one dominate social group finds its identity and coherence as oppressors of a target group. Social dominance can take the form of ethnic cleansing that will not stop short of extermination, and then we are dealing with genocide. To maintain the distinction between perpetrators and victims one may simply ask: Who was to be exterminated and by whom? The social or ethnic group that is targeted for extermination compromises the group of victims, and the perpetrators are the ethnic group targeting them for extermination. An ethical gray zone is not a tangible place per se. An ethical gray zone is referentially opaque, nonetheless, it does aptly describe the circumstances where victims like Primo Levi found himself. The ethical gray zone describes a sphere of action. The dominant ethnic group may identify, tag, and quarantine the target group as first steps toward the creation of an ethical gray zone. Then they may deny social rights and privileges to the target group. Finally, the dominant ethnic group may segregate members of the target group and confine them to a specific local such as a ghetto or imprison them in a concentration camp. This social and physical confinement in a place apart from the dominant group may place the victims in an ethical gray zone. Scarcity of basic goods for survival such as food and medicine frequently exacerbated the plight of the victims entering an ethical gray zone. This scarcity of basic goods for survival may be artificial and imposed by the oppressors within a ghetto or a concentration camp. For instance, in Primo Levi’s concentration camp the possession of a spoon was a great good. To obtain a spoon, occupants of his camp had to pay dearly or steal their spoon. When Levi’s camp was liberated, a sizable hoard of spoons was found to be on site. Scarcity of spoons was manufactured when administrators of the camp withheld the resources from the prisoners.

Entrapment in an Ethical Gray Zone The term “gray” in “ethical gray zone” connotes an ambiguous ethical situation where black-and-white distinctions are blurred. Broadly construed the term could refer to any situation where one’s freedom to act was compromised by coercion or duress. Hence, the term could be applied

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to sundry circumstances. Victoria J. Barnett says, “The historical reality of the Holocaust was defined at numerous levels by ‘gray zones’ that tend to subvert any universal ethical conclusions one might draw.”4 Barnett suggests that German churches entered an ethical gray zone when they were compelled to give an account for their activity or lack thereof during the Nazi era. In this study the principal reference for ethical gray zones shall be those conditions identified by Primo Levi in his writings—Survival in Auschwitz or The Drown and the Saved. These ethical gray zones can appear during the peak phase of genocide, that is, in Stanton’s stages of (8) persecution and (9) extermination. During the peak phase of genocide, the principal victims are distinguishable from perpetrators and bystanders or rescuers as persons targeted for extermination. These zones are the ethical circumstances that victims find themselves placed within. This is not to say German churches did not occupy an ethical gray zone during the war or shortly after the Nazis were defeated. Rather it is to focus attention upon the exceptional ethical circumstances of victims of the Holocaust and genocide. Victims in ethical gray zones are denied ethical parity practically and in intersubjective relations.5 The ethical gray zone described by Primo Levi was an artificial zone created by the perpetrators that entrapped the victims. Basic rights such as freedom of movement or ownership of property were denied the victims. Perpetrators treated victims with abusive violence and the threat of death. Victims found themselves encapsulated in a virtually inescapable prison of terror. The primary focus of perpetrator’s wrongdoing is their genocidal killing. As a result, their responsibility for the creation of ethical gray zones may receive less attention than it deserves. In some instances, the conditions that prevailed in ethical gray zones may have contributed to the extermination of its occupants. For instance, depriving individuals of food and water while they were imprisoned contributed directly to their mortality. The action that victims could take is to be understood dialectically. Robert Ehrenreich points out that victims could act to avoid the violent actions of perpetrators or attempt to appease the perpetrators.6 While escape of victims from ethical gray zones was theoretically possible, there were few ways to escape. To escape from an ethical gray zone, one would have to be freed from the perpetrators’ domination. One could escape by death or suicide. One could escape by flight. Or one could escape by liberation. Escape by death or suicide would not allow the victim to resume

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life. Flight was rarely possible given the conditions of the confinement. Liberation could free an individual from both the domination and the confinement; if the victims were not so emaciated that they could not enjoy their freedom. Once the victims were liberated the challenge of finding a place to go lay ahead. Family and social ties were in many cases irreparably severed. Prior to the liberation bystanders were loath to lend support to victims lest they meet with reprisals, and for some time after liberation this reluctance to cooperate continued. It is frequently asked why the Jews did not resist the Nazis who were persecuting them or why they did not rebel against the Kapo’s. Most instances of resistance proved futile. Schlomo Venezia saw three Jews refuse to become members of the Sonderkommando. Immediately they were shot dead. These individuals followed a moral choice that would not allow them to facilitate killing or contact the dead. Remaining faithful to their code of conduct was a fatal choice. For those who regard life as sacred, cooperation with the Nazis would not have been a choice they could make. Retaliation for resistance was swift and deadly. Resistance within the camps for the informed was as suicidal as throwing oneself onto the electrified fence.

Ethics in the Gray Zones Individuals are placed in ethical gray zones when they are violently thrust out of the universal moral realm. They become victims in the process, and they no longer count as members of the ethical universe. This process of creating and populating an ethical gray zone transforms the universal within the categorical imperative to a relative category. If one assumes that moral agents were acting under the Kantian categorical imperative before the formation of ethical gray zones, then the creation of these gray zones would constitute a forced transition in ethical behavior. Both perpetrators and victims would be acting upon hypothetical imperatives. Who counts and who does not count as moral agents would be defined by brute force or majority rule. Perhaps one could say perpetrators created ethical gray zones for victims. Perpetrators did create the conditions of confinement and scarcity that were fertile for ethical gray zones, and that would suggest perpetrators occupied an ethical space apart from victims’ gray zones. However, it should be observed that the gray zones blur the distinction between perpetrators and victims. If we assume that all occupants in the gray zone are

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victims, the actions of victims may be analyzed by applying the perpetrators-victims-bystanders schema. In other words, upon analysis one may find victim-perpetrators, victim-bystanders, and victim-victims within the gray zone. Perpetrators were responsible for entrapping victims in these circumstances. They were also responsible for an indifference toward ethical behavior if not a malevolent attitude toward it. They could look upon the actions against victims with indifference, and they could denigrate displays of altruism or benevolence among victims. Hanna Arndt reports that Eichmann’s self-defense included a reference to a transformed personal ethic. He became indifferent to the fate of Jews who were forced into concentration camps and work details where their lives were constantly at risk. When he embraced the “Final Solution” as his duty, he surrendered his obligation to act on the categorical imperative.7 By placing victims in ethical gray zones perpetrators were demonstrating that they did not regard victims as members of the social contract nor as genuine moral agents. When one is recognized as a member of a social contract, one anticipates a sense of reciprocity in his or her treatment as an equal. Since victims were neither members of the social contract nor genuine moral agents in the eyes of the perpetrators, they could expect no reciprocity in their treatment. This may explain why perpetrators responded with indifference to the pleas of victims that familial ties be respected in their treatment of victims. To no avail victims pleaded with perpetrators not to separate family members. Elie Wiesel took great pains to remain as close to his father as possible. This required some bargaining with Kapos, and Wiesel often had to pay dearly to remain in the same work group or to attend to his father in his last hours. One of the Kapos saw this as an opportunity to be exploited by demanding of Wiesel the payment of a gold crown. Perpetrators remained indifferent to these problems since they did not count victims as persons with rights. Ethical action in the gray zone of Primo Levi was circumscribed by the final solution. The final solution treated a selective set of individuals such as Jews as expendable commodities. They were expected to succumb to the hardships of work and starvation, that is, to die. Those that did not succumb to the hardships were to be executed. The victims might dream of liberation, but from the perspective of the perpetrators the victims were living under a sentence of death. Those who did not succumb to the rigors of overwork and starvation were to be executed. These conditions could provide gray zone occupants with an existential excuse for their ethical behavior. They were acting as persons condemned to die.

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Victoria Barnett said, “The historical reality of the Holocaust was defined at numerous levels by ‘gray zones’ that tend to subvert any universal ethical conclusions one might draw”8 One may grant that the ethical gray zone was an anomial zone, that is, a lawless zone. Existing in an ethical gray zone provided moral actors with an existential excuse to forgo altruistic ethical principles. Any action taken was taken under coercion and duress. To say that this was a lawless existence is not to say that it was necessarily an amoral existence. It was still possible to make moral judgments in the ethical gray zone. It was still possible to act with care and altruism or not. In Primo Levi’s view there was a default ethical position in the gray zone. He calls it “the principle rule of the place.” It is simple egoism. Levi quotes Ella Lingens-Reiner who says, “How was I able to survive in Auschwitz? My principle is: I come first, second, and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others.”9 In the ethical gray zone one is expelled from the realm of universal moral judgments, and one is thrust into a realm where egoism prevails. The doctor that attended Elie Wiesel’s father expressed a similar outlook, when he said, “In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as a father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone.”10 If moral society is an elevation above a state of nature, then the ethical gray zone is a superimposed unnatural state where brute force can prevail only against the other victims but not the oppressors in most instances. It is tempting to say that universal moral principles could not apply in this context where ethical action of victims is circumscribed by their perpetrators’ threat of death. In spite of the apparent reversion to base egoism it is possible that some moral judgments could be made in this context. If care is a virtue and cruelty is a vice, then the possibility of making moral judgements about the virtue or viciousness of victims’ behavior remains open. Furthermore, the dynamics of social relations among victims may further impact our moral judgments about victims in gray zones. Most victims were socially on a par in ghettos or concentration camps. One exception to that was the delegation of authority to some victims such as the Judenrat in the ghettos or the Kapos in the concentration camps. Another exception to social parity was the assignment of victims to special task forces such as the Sonderkommandos. As we examine the ethical behavior of actors in ethical gray zones, we can say they were undergoing a transformation when they were thrust into

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the gray zone, and they were undergoing a transformation while they continued to exist in the gray zone. The initial transformation placed the victims in the ethical gray zone. Richard L Rubenstein calls this a “state of nature far worse than any Thomas Hobbes could have imagined.” In Hobbes’ state of nature individuals may have warred against one another, but they were not subject to an overarching authority with genocidal intent. Moreover, the scarcities that individuals suffered in a state of nature would have been happenstance scarcities that could possibly be offset by some natural boon. The scarcities of the ethical gray zones of the Holocaust were superimposed upon the victims and at times regulated by the perpetrators. In those conditions one was virtually stripped of his or her social inhibitions and ethical inclinations. What followed was likewise a process of transformation of ethical commitments. For instance, individuals who were mildly indifferent to the sufferings of others at times could become malevolent in their dealings with others. In the criminal proceedings that followed the Holocaust Primo Levi thought a broad-based absolution should be extended to victims who survived. He said, “If it were up to me, if I were forced to judge, I would lightheartedly absolve all those whose concurrence in the guilt was minimal and for whom coercion was of the highest degree”.11 Victims’ wrongdoing and victim-on-victim violence took various forms. For instance, victims stole food from German citizens while they were on forced death marches. Victims also stole other victims’ spoons or rations. These thefts were committed for the purpose of acquiring the basic needs of life. As Russian and Allied troops approached the concentration camps in 1944, the Nazis chose to evacuate their Jewish occupants. Like other prisoners, Elie Wiesel and his father were forced into a cattle car to be transported by train across the German countryside. When the train had stopped in the countryside some bystanders threw bread to the starving prisoners, and victim-on-victim violence ensued. In Wiesel’s train car when a father caught a piece of bread thrown by a bystander, the son killed the father to get the bread. Then others attacked the son. Wiesel described the scene as follows. The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. Nobody cared. His son searched him, took the crust of bread, and began to devour it. He didn’t get far. Two men had been watching him. They jumped him. Others joined in. When they withdrew, there were two dead bodies next to me, the father and the son.12

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Under normal circumstances these acts would be condemned as theft and murder. Yet, the thieves and murderers were thrust into their predicament by the perpetrators. No perpetrator forced the son to kill the father. Yet, the perpetrators did force the son to make choices to compete in a life-and-death struggle to acquire resources to live. The Nazi perpetrators forced the victim into an unnatural state of nature where self-defense by brute force was required for survival. In the ghettos the Judenrat or selected leaders exercised a power delegated to them, and in the concentration camps the Kapos were appointed to maintain peace and to make life-or-death decisions regarding the fate of the victims. Not infrequently the empowered victims abused their authority and victimized those individuals they supervised. Many are the reports of day-by-day beatings or disciplinary lashings. When Wiesel was idly wandering about the camp, he discovered the Kapos, Idek, having sexual intercourse with a Polish girl.13 For this discovery he was subject to a brutal whipping. Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, said, “in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”14 The Judenrat not only victimized specific individuals, but their abuse of power could also be leveled against large segments of the population. This was illustrated in the Lodz Ghetto that was under the supervision of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski. Richard L Rubenstein observes, “When Rumkowski first sought ghetto leadership, he may have been a collaborationist making a questionable bargain with a brutally abusive occupying power, but he was not making a devil’s bargain with a regime he knew to be unremittingly genocidal.”15 Rumkowski first assumed power over the Lodz Ghetto in 1939, and he may have chosen to act as a mere opportunist. His loyalty to the Nazi perpetrators transformed his ethic of self-­service in the coming months. By 1942 Rumkowski must have known that the Nazis were driven by genocidal intentions. Nonetheless, in September of that year he announced to the Lodz Ghetto that he intended to comply with an order to send away from the ghetto 20,000 Jews. He had grown fond of the power he wielded, and he did not hesitate to include the sick and the aging in the tally of those he would sacrifice. Speaking of a different ghetto leader Wiesel said, “There were many people like Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw, who killed himself the day the Germans demanded a daily quota of ten thousand Jews for Treblinka.” In contrast, Wiesel considered Rumkowski a victim but someone whose actions were nonetheless indefensible.16

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At times Nazis did resort to brute violence to exterminate Jews. Many Jews were killed by crushing blows to the head with a gunstock or a shot in the back of the skull. However, the Nazis preferred to automate the process wherever it was possible. This could distance them from the killing and considerably increase the number killed. In the early part of the war mobile trucks were used to kill victims with carbon monoxide. At the height of the war a more insidious plan was developed. At killing camps like Auschwitz victims were killed in factory fashion by poison gas, and their remains were cremated in specially designed ovens. Conveyance of the lifeless corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens required considerable physical labor. Since the Nazis aimed to avoid contact with the bodies of their victims, they assigned this task to members of the Sonderkommandos. In ethical gray zones the levels of complicity and the levels of wrongdoing varied. One could be slightly complicitous, or one could be entirely blameworthy for wrongdoing. This breadth of wrongful activity is illustrated in an analysis of the actions of the Sonderkommandos. On the one hand, they took action that facilitated the killing of Jews by the Nazis. On the other hand, they sometimes became the instruments that would enable the killing to occur. Whether Jews were killed by a bullet, blunt force trauma such as bludgeoning with a gunstock, or asphyxiation by poison gas; the corpses of the dead had to be disposed. Mass graves served the purpose of ridding the landscape of accumulating bodies killed by gunfire. In the killing camps where the method of choice became poison gas, the bodies had to be removed from the gas chamber and transferred to a grave or to an oven for cremation. Sonderkommandos were appointed to remove the bodies of those killed by poison gas and to transport them to the ovens for cremation. Before this was completed hair or gold fillings were removed from the bodies as a final act of desecration. One could say these workers were only manipulating the corpses of those already killed. That is true. The Sonderkommandos were not responsible for killing the Jews in these instances, but they were responsible for desecrating the bodies of the dead. Since the process was organized into an assembly-line, their failure to perform these tasks would have halted the killing process, and they would have been killed for their inaction. Likewise, members of this task force were responsible for completing work that would allow Nazis to continue the operation of gassing more victims. Their work was instrumentally valuable to the killing process.

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In Schlomo Venezia’s pathetic account of his experience he details how members of the Sonderkommandos were forced to participate in acts that would kill Jews. First, while emptying the gas chambers it was rare to find anyone who survived. If there were survivors, the Sonderkommandos were required to dispense with the survivors. In other words, they had to kill survivors or present them to supervisors to be killed. Second, not all persons sent to the gas chambers were physically fit to make the journey. Many who were too weak to enter the gas chambers were killed by shooting. Since these individuals may have lacked the strength to stand on their own, members of the Sonderkommandos like Venezia had to bodily support these persons while a shot was administered to the head of the victim. Refusal to complete the task would result in the commando’s being shot. Third, the gas chambers were constructed so that it required additional manpower to drop the poison gas cylinders in the chamber through concrete covered vents. Venezia reports that he had to hold open the vents while the Nazis dropped the poison gas inside and afterward seal the vents. In each of the three instances the commandos were not manipulating the corpses of dead persons. Instead, the life of the Jews was in the hands of the commandos. In a court of law these commandos would be identified as material accomplices to the murder of the victims. The three Jews who refused to serve in the Sonderkommandos were executed straightaway as were others who knew of the unit’s duties and refused to serve. Venezia chose to serve rather than to be executed. From the view of simple egoism, he chose the right action, and the life that he saved had intrinsic worth. However, that judgment overlooks the ways that Venezia was drawn into the work. At first, he was enlisted to do manual labor such as digging trenches that would become mass graves. After he had taken the bait of additional food rations, Venezia was then introduced to the grotesque duties such as the transference of corpses. When Venezia finally understood what his duties were, he knew that refusal to serve would result in immediate execution. By serving Venezia was demonstrating that his life had intrinsic value for himself. Yet, as he became more deeply involved in the workings of the killing camp, he developed a new motive that would place a higher instrumental value on his life. He began living to bear witness. It was his objective to survive so that he could subsequently expose to the world the atrocities that the Nazis so carefully sought to cover up.

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Return from the Gray Zones Members of the Sonderkommandos were not allowed to associate with the general population of the concentration camps. In addition, Nazis periodically executed members of the unit to ensure that they could not communicate to others what they were doing. Venezia relates that he managed to hide himself in the general population of the camp when it was evacuated. He refused to identify himself with the unit during the evacuation march even when a search was conducted for members of the unit. On January 17, 1945, the evacuation of Auschwitz had begun. Members of the Sonderkommandos had been given stern orders not to associate with the general population. Venezia had been acting under orders to dismantle the camp, and he suspected the Nazis would soon execute the squadron. Seeing an opportunity to lose himself in the crowds of evacuees he did so. The death march from Auschwitz led to Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee. During the march, the German guards asked who worked in the unit. Had members of the unit been exposed, they would have been executed on the spot. Venezia experienced the basic drive to survive, and he shared with others a desire later to bear witness. For many the drive to bear witness became the motivation to live. Of his bearing witness Venezia said, “It comforts me to know that I’m not talking in a vacuum, since bearing witness exacts a huge sacrifice. It reawakens a nagging pain that never leaves me.…It’s like an inner flaw; I call it survivors’ disease.’”17 Wiesel believed he had to give some meaning to his survival.18 To give meaning to their survival Wiesel, Venezia, and others chose to bear witness. Wiesel said, “Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness.” For these individuals survival took on an instrumental value for the end of bearing witness.

Transformations Genocide may place victims in ethical gray zones that engulf the victims like quicksand. By placing victims in these ethical gray zones, the ethics of perpetrators may be transformed. The ethics of the victims is transformed upon entering the gray zones, and it may continue to be transformed during the time the victims are in those zones. If the victims are able to escape from the gray zones, they may not be able to escape the transformations

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that they have undergone. As Venezia closed his interview he said, “Nobody ever really gets out of the Crematorium.”19 Adolph Eichmann epitomizes the loyal Nazi whose ethics were transformed from a categorical imperative to an institutional imperative. In his defense Eichmann claimed that he was simply following orders. That was both true and false. It was true that Eichmann was responding to the problem of the Jews, that is, the problem of how to insulate the Aryans from all effects of the Jews—social, religious, psychological, economic, and biological. From the view of a scientific racism that supposed the preservation and promotion of the Aryan race was the prime objective it followed that Jews posed a threat. Universal ethics were sacrificed for a teleological ethics that took the preservation of the Aryan race as an intrinsically valuable end. Rumkowski epitomized a member of the Judenrat whose ethics were transformed within the ethical gray zone. Initially Rumkowski acted as an opportunist to maneuver himself into a position of power in the Lodz ghetto. With his assumption of leadership came a sense of power. Through an iron rule and through granting favors to the general population of victims held in the ghetto Rumkowski could enlarge and enhance his power base. One supposes that Rumkowski shed only crocodile tears when he agreed to deport 20,000 occupants of Lodz. His love of power may have begun as a vice, but it turned vicious and callous as Rumkowski yielded to the wishes of his uncaring masters. Throughout history oppressors have denied the full rights of citizenship to their victims. By placing individuals in ethical gray zones, the Nazis managed to restrict the ethical behavior that Jews and others could exercise. They denied Jews and others the right to make ethical choices free of duress and coercion. Through his artwork David Olere, a member of the Sonderkommando, began to bear witness to the atrocities of the crematorium shortly after he was liberated in 1945. His wash and China ink drawings provided a graphic depiction of the gruesome work of the unit. As we have seen members of the unit were forced to serve or die. They served through the animal instinct of valuing their own lives. If one believes Victor Frankel, then one would find a deeper meaning in the survival of Olere and Venezia than simple animal instinct. Frankel said, “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.” 20 Some years later Venezia traded the comfort

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of silence for the discomfort of bearing witness. He reported that he was driven by a non-reflective animal instinct to survive in spite of the conditions. Reflection on his survival drove Venezia to break his silence about his experience. In both cases their guiding moral principle in their gray zone was simple self-preservation. In time they replaced the egoistic imperative with a new imperative: “I must bear witness.” The intrinsic worth of survival was replaced with extrinsic worth of bearing witnesses. The general population of victims were undergoing transformations of their individual ethics also. Wiesel witnessed egoism at its worst. He retained a sense of loyalty to his father, and he resisted the doctor’s urging that he take his father’s ration of bread for himself. Primo Levi was a devoted friend to a close companion, but he could be indifferent to the newcomers who were forced to learn the art of survival in short order. During full-­blown genocide, some individuals could be identified as a cohort of victims, and Primo Levi was one of those numbers. Levi’s eventual liberation was evidence that the ethical gray zone was no static existence. Within those ethical gray zones, the role of individuals could be fluid. Victims could become perpetrator-victims. Bystanders in the grey zones could be forced into the role of victims as a reprisal for small acts of complicity. Perpetrators could become rescuers while full-blown genocidal killing was happening, or they could become rescuers when liberation was impending. Through the process ethical transitions could be superimposed on individuals, and individuals could subjectively transform their guiding ethical principles in response to their circumstances.

Conclusion Before concluding four objections should be considered—the lifeboat objection, the person and patient objection, the irresponsibility objection, and the pragmatic objection. First, an objector may reply that this account of ethical gray zones does not differ from a lifeboat scenario or a cannibalism on a tropical island scenario. In those scenarios the struggle to survive drives individuals to resort to extraordinary measures to maintain life. In reply, ethical gray zones in genocidal killing camps differ significantly from lifeboat scenarios, since the former are artificial circumstances created by perpetrators while the latter arise in natural disasters. Natural disasters may bring about several forms of scarcity. Under normal circumstances we may say that the scarcity is bad or life-threatening, but it is not

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intentional. In contrast, the scarcity of spoons in Levi’s camp described earlier was malevolent. The perpetrators could have resolved the problem, but they chose not to do so. That choice resulted in greater suffering for the victims. Second, an objector may argue that persons in ethical gray zones should be identified as patients. The distinction between patients and persons appears frequently in the literature of medical ethics, and it is apropos for some individuals who are dependents. The dependents do not count as persons, since they have failed to develop significant cognitive faculties that would allow them to make informed decisions, or they may have lost the use of similar cognitive faculties for decision-making. Victims in genocidal killing camps differ from patients in significant ways. We may assume they have lost none of their capacity to reason or make decisions. Furthermore, perpetrators not only deny that victims have those capacities, but they also identify victims with lower life forms. In other words, if victims were regarded as patients, they would have received better treatment than they did receive. Third, an objector may argue that the responsibility of victims varied. Here the objector is recognizing that there may be victim-perpetrators, victim-victims, and victims; but the objector is questioning their responsibility for their action. That is both true and false, and it calls attention to a unique feature of victim’s existence in killing camps. It is true that the victims had some freedom within the killing camps. A widely held belief among some thinkers is that individuals lack significant freedom when they could not do otherwise, and it is supposed that an actor’s inability to do otherwise is not contingent on his or her knowledge of it. If victims lack significant freedom to do otherwise, then they are not responsible for their actions. Victims in concentrations camps had freedom within limits defined by the perpetrators. It is false that victims did not know they lacked significant freedom, and it is false that they had no freedom whatsoever. The freedom that they had is a freedom that the perpetrators granted. Victims did have freedom to determine how they would interact with other prisoners. In most instances they were responsible for their actions toward other prisoners. Would this apply to the actions of the Sondercommandos? I would argue: No. Members of that special unit were subject to extraordinary duress and coercion. When one reads the pathetic account of Venzila, one supposes he saw himself as a soul trapped in a body that was made to do things he would not otherwise do.

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Fourth, an objector may ask, “So what? What has the author shown that was not already discovered in the literature on genocide?” The reply to the fourth objection may be found in a review of the basic actors in genocide—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. By the creation of ethical gray zones perpetrators have disrupted the moral universe. They have placed outside the universal category actors who were fully qualified to make free choices. The actors were placed in artificial environments where they were forced to make choices that would ultimately serve the ends of the perpetrators. In the Holocaust this was driven by racial concerns, and this becomes indicative of the superior value assigned to race. In other words, race trumped morality in the Holocaust. While the observation is not new, it is a sober forewarning that the elevation of the value of race is a prelude to the undermining of ethical values. It was supposed that the moral responsibility of victims could vary. All victims were not equally irresponsible, even if the ethical gray zone was an anomial state of existence. Furthermore, when the inability to do otherwise is an artificial condition, it may dampen freedom but not eliminate freedom. Finally, it was observed that bystanders at any level of existence cannot abdicate their responsibility. In a chapter that follows the responsibility of bystanders for complicity shall be examined in greater depth.

Notes 1. By having “ethical parity” I mean that all recognized members of the moral community enjoy parity or equality. When some refuse to recognize the standing of others the unrecognized are denied ethical parity. 2. Larry May, Crimes Against Humanity Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Cambridge University, 1996), 193. 3. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, First Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 47. 4. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Grey Zones: Ambiguity and compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York, New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 369. 5. An extended discussion of ethical parity is planned for a separate work. 6. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution, 6. 7. Bernard J.  Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “the Final Solution” (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 199), 43. 8. Petropoulos and Roth, Grey Zones, 368.

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9. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 79. 10. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. 1st American ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 110. 11. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 44. 12. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 103. 13. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 57. 14. Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning, 105. 15. Petropoulos and Roth, Grey Zones, 302 16. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 65. 17. Shlomo Venezia, et  al. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz. English ed. (New York: Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 154. 18. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, viii. 19. Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers,155. 20. Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning, 117.

CHAPTER 11

Bystanders to Genocide

Introduction This chapter examines the role of bystanders in genocide. The very name— bystanders—implies that these are individuals who are neither perpetrators nor victims, but persons caught between. They appear to be ignorant, indifferent, or disengaged. Their disengagement seems to give them a warrant to claim they were innocent. Bystanders who recognize and reject the harm and wrongdoing of perpetrators may join the ranks of resistors. Bystanders who remain uncommitted or succumb to the siren song of perpetrators can become complicitous. Anthony Apia pointed out that racism and injustice in a society taints its members.1 I argue that bystanders may be complicit to the extent that they fail to come to terms with the tainted genocidal society where they live. To demonstrate how actors became complicitous in the Holocaust we consider several case studies: the case of Pastor Martin Niemöller, and the case of A. J. Topf & Sons, the case of the German church, and the case of the bystander nation. I maintain that perpetrators could not fulfill their genocidal intention without some bystander’s complacency or complicity. Raul Wallenberg’s book, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, provides a handy nomenclature to classify individuals in a time of genocide. Those who are not perpetrators, not victims, and not rescuers are bystanders. As an exculpating excuse bystanders may claim to have been innocent of perpetrating genocidal harm, but were they? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_11

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Some may wish to assert that bystanders occupy a neutral zone between the oppressors and the oppressed. Neutral nation states may claim they occupy a similar safe zone in international relations. To confirm their innocence bystanders would have to ensure the exchange between perpetrators and victims would happen without their involvement. This proclaimed innocence proves to be impossible to verify. Bystanders hear things, see things, and do things within that society. What bystanders hear, see, and do undermines their best efforts to remain unaware or neutral in the face of genocide. If they are not deterring genocide by their actions and omissions, bystanders can become supporters of the violence of genocide. In the post-Holocaust proceeding individuals actively sought to be classified as bystanders rather than first or second grade perpetrators. Bystanders resorted to the excuse that they did not know of wrongdoing and did not participate in it. Ignorance and inaction may be accepted as exculpating excuses if they can be substantiated. In a society suffering from the tainting of racism, the plea of ignorance is frequently a ruse to cover an indifference to the sufferings of others. This study explores the ways that bystanders can be implicated in the proceedings of perpetrators. Claims of individual neutrality or individual indifference in these circumstances seem naïve. It seems appropriate to say that bystanders to the Holocaust were tainted by Nazis’ genocidal racism. Perpetrators are distinguished by degree of intentions, commitment, and activity. Victims are distinguished by their degree of oppression and suffering. Bystanders are distinguished by (1) their degree of ignorance of the perpetrator’s intentions, (2) their approbation of perpetrators’ behavior, (3) their empowerment of perpetrators, and (4) their readiness to support perpetrators. Bystanders may willfully or unwittingly moderate the degree of their ignorance. They are not victims to whom violence is directed, nor are they oppressors per se. Yet, seeing and feeling the violence that surrounded them was inescapable. Additionally, bystanders did carry on life functions and societal relations, and it is this continuance of life and societal relations that raises questions about their contribution to the total effect. In the general population bystanders were consumers of the propaganda that aimed to harm victims. Through propaganda the general

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population heard allegations of the harm that victims were said to have worked against them. Through simple hearsay and observation, bystanders could know much more about how victims were treated. The operations of mass murder carried out in concentration camps were carefully disguised to avoid detection by enemies, but some bystanders could not avoid knowing what was going on. Civilians who would have provided clerical help within the concentration camps or farmers who marketed goods to concentration camps would have been able to witness the proceedings in the camps. Those removed from the action could only surmise what was happening. As an aggregate the German population knew about the killing of Jews and others. Dwight Eisenhower ordered civilians in neighboring towns to tour some concentration camps after their liberation. He wanted to document the atrocities so that deniers could not come forward later to claim the mass killing never happened. A reasonable assumption is that many were not ignorant of the proceedings in concentration camps. A clerk in the office of Topf and Sons who recorded bills of sale would have been aware that crematoria were manufactured on a massive scale to incinerate huge numbers of corpses. Children who saw the infirm herded into the cargo hold of vans and saw their dead bodies evacuated knew that mass murder was happening. Railroad engineers who transported padlocked cattle cars full of prisoners only to abandon them on the rail line would have known that mass murder was happening. Diplomats who supported the “Final Solution” would have known that mass murder was happening. Clergy persons who offered or refused to offer sanctuary to Jews in flight would have known that mass murder was happening. The evidence suggests many bystanders knew. A case has been made for the victimization of the German population. The German population was and was not victimized. On the one hand, it was victimized by accepting the Nazi propaganda it was fed. For many this propaganda was simply a confirmation of the racial bias that they already accepted. Those who followed this racial bias to its gruesome conclusion were victims of their own self-destructive hatred. On the other hand, not all the German population did accept the propaganda or the violence that ensued. The rescuers discussed in chapter eight rejected the propaganda that the masses found so agreeable.

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Bystanders and Complicity Bystanders’ social and causal ties to the victims and perpetrators were the occasion for complicity. In his book, Complicity and Moral Accountability, Gregory Mellema suggests that complicity in harm happens only in cases where there is a clear perpetrator of harm.2 If it can be shown that the perpetrator’s ends were not achieve without accomplices, then the issue of complicity presents itself. Mellema says, “Most of the time the blame borne by the principal actor for the relevant outcome is greater than that borne by someone complicit in the wrongdoing of the principal actor for the outcome (and the degree of blame borne by the latter, as pointed out earlier, might be zero).”3 Complicity in genocidal killing blurs the lines of distinction between perpetrators and bystanders. What cements the relationship between perpetrators and victims is a harmful or untoward act. The subject of the harmful act is the perpetrator, the harmful act is represented by a transitive verb, and the object of the transitive verb is the victim: Joe kills Mary. The bystander is neither the subject nor the object of the transitive action, but the bystander does have a direct relationship to both the perpetrator and the victim. The question of the bystander’s complicity in the perpetrator’s wrongdoing arises in those cases where the bystander is not encumbered and may be implicated in the wrongdoing. In other words, the bystander could count in some sense as an accomplice or an enabler. Complicity confounds the identification of bystanders as non-­ perpetrators or non-victims. Bystanders were morally tainted by the events surrounding them, but the judgment that they were just tainted seems tepid. Bystanders were not merely persons who lived in the proximity to genocidal activities. They were persons who saw the events of genocide unfolding, persons who could draw conclusions about the disappearance of victims, persons who contributed to the economic and social flow of society, persons to whom victims could appeal for assistance, and persons who could speak out rather than remain silent. Complicity inserts bystanders into the relationship of perpetrators and victims as enablers or accomplices. Complicity socially and causally connects the bystander to the perpetrator and the victim. Not all bystanders were complicitous: some were complicitous, and others were not. The complicitous bystander contributes to the harm perpetrators did to victims. Perpetrators had a direct but not an exclusive relationship to victims.

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Bystanders related themselves to both perpetrators and victims when they were complicit. When the relationship between perpetrators and victims is seen as a rigid and exclusive relationship, only a few may be blamed. When some chose to blame only Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels but not the masses, it drew attention away from bystanders. When the relationship between perpetrators and victims was seen as expansive and indirect, more were blamed who could have counted as bystanders. Blaming an entire population or generation for the Holocaust took place when some members of the clergy presumed that they were speaking on behalf of the German nation of the early twentieth century when they confessed and sought forgiveness. To avoid this all-or-noting impasse one needs some criteria for judging the degree of blame that is to be assigned to bystanders. Mellema identifies no less than nine ways an individual can become complicitous in harm.4 The first six ways are types of commissions that qualify an actor as complicitous: (1) commanding harm; (2) counsel for harm; (3) consenting to harm; (4) flattery of the harmful actor or deed; (5) receipt of goods or services that results in harm; (6) and participation in harmful action. The last three are types of omissions that qualify an actor as complicitous: (7) silence about a harmful actor or deed; (8) failure to prevent a harm; (9) and failure to denounce a harmful actor or deed. Using Mellema’s nine criteria as a checklist we may scrutinize an actor’s behavior to determine if the actor was complicit in one or more ways in the Holocaust. Complicity in one way may indicate that an actor supplied minimal aid to a perpetrator on one occasion. Complicity in more than one way may indicate that an actor aided a perpetrator fully or repeatedly. Benign complicity would happen when an actor could be faulted with the satisfaction of a minimum of criteria—one or two—of complicity on rare occasion(s). Vicious complicity would happen when an actor could be faulted as satisfying multiple criteria for complicity on multiple occasions. Bystanders may claim, “I did not do the deed.” Deflecting the charge of complicity is not so simple. To be an innocent bystander one would have to establish that he or she did not contribute to wrongdoing by commanding the deed, did not counsel that the deed be done, did not consent to the deed, did not flatter the perpetrator of the deed, did not receive goods or services that resulted from the deed, or did not aid in the completion of the deed. Also, to be an innocent bystander one would have to establish that he or she was not silent about the deed, did actively oppose

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the deed in some manner, and did denounce the deed. The last criteria requires that the bystander respond with the appropriate attitude of disapproval. The seventh criterion poses a special challenge for bystanders: failure to denounce a harmful actor or deed. It is assumed that this dis-approbation would be communicated publicly, though it is not clear what would be required to count as disapproval. A grunt, shaking the head, or wagging the finger would be sufficient to denounce the deed rather than a formal written statement such as a letter to the editor. It seems unlikely that a bystander could deflect the charge of complicity by saying that at the time of the deed the bystander thought or felt that the deed was not harmful. Instead, the bystander would need to demonstrate his or her public communication of disapprobation. To understand better how bystanders were complicitous in genocide we shall examine four cases. Those cases are (1) complicity in the life of Martin Niemöller; (2) complicity of employees of J. A. Toph and Sons (3) complicity of the German Lutheran church, and (4) complicity of neighboring and international states.

Martin Niemöller ’s Courage and Regrets Where should one place Martin Niemöller in the perpetrator-victim-­ bystander scheme? Niemöller was both a bystander to the crimes of the Nazis and at the time an apparent victim. He became Hitler’s personal prisoner. In retrospect he recognized that his nationalism was a crucial factor in the drama that ensued. Niemöller had served in the German Navy during World War I.  After the war he was formally ordained as a member of the clergy. For his clerical commitment combined with his Aryan ancestry he qualified as a bystander, since he was not a member of the Nazi armed forces nor a Jew. For his courage he was a victim. Arguably Niemöller did endure imprisonment along with many victims, but in this authors’ judgment Niemöller was rightly judged to be a bystander. Yet, his life confirms that bystanders were not altogether innocents even if they were not perpetrators. Shortly after the war Niemöller engaged in soul-­ searching and self-recrimination about his succumbing to the charm of Hitler before 1933. When Niemöller eventually became a pacifist in 1954, he then loudly denounced the past actions of the Nazis and repented of his own hawkish views.

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If we classify Niemöller as a bystander, then we must conclude he was no ordinary bystander. Between 1937 and 1945 Niemöller was a prisoner whose precarious existence approached that of the victim. On May 2, 1938, Niemöller was tried and convicted primarily for his opposition to policies affecting the church. When he was sentenced and about to be released, Hitler intervened. Niemöller became Hitler’s personal prisoner and was sent to Sachsenhausen.5 As the war advanced, he was shifted from one prison camp to another. On July 11, 1942, he assumed the prisoner identification number 26679  in Dachau. He remained a prisoner until American troops liberated him on May 4, 1945.6 Unlike Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niemöller ’s incarceration did not culminate in his death. During his time as a prisoner, he enjoyed visitation rights with his wife and family, had access to his Bible, and was allowed privileges afforded to few prisoners of war such as daily exercise. Niemöller was no forgotten prisoner destined for death like the millions of Jews the Nazis killed. To appraise Niemöller ’s role as a bystander we may use Mellema’s six criteria of actions and three criteria of omissions to establish complicity. Niemöller was not guilty of (#9) not denouncing the Nazis. He did denounce the interference of the Nazis in church business with the result that his pastoral appointment was suspended in 1935. He was not (#7) silent about the Nazis’ attempts to create a state church. Yet these acts of protest came late. His incarceration in 1938 appears to have rendered Niemöller incapable of committing actions that would classify him as complicitous. Upon closer inspection acts of complicity seem to pepper Niemöller ’s life both before his incarceration and after. In the face of public harm, it is hard to overlook (#7) silence in the early years about the harm of Jewish discrimination and a (#9) failure to denounce harm. Niemöller was a loyal supporter of German nationalism, and prior to 1933 he believed Hitler could revitalize German nationalism. When Niemöller and other pastors formed the Pastor’s Emergency League in 1933, their aim was to uphold the right of existing clergy to provide clerical service including the eleven clergy who were of Jewish heritage. The persecution of unbaptized Jews was not something that concerned Niemöller in those days. He may have been outspoken about the interference of the Nazis in the business of the church, but he was noticeably silent about the Nuremburg Laws of September 15, 1935, that denied fundamental rights to Jews. Niemöller was a key figure in “the Church Struggle” against Nazification of the church. To that end he and other clergy lent their support to a

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confessional of six theses called the “Barmen Confessional.” In spite of its genius, its failure to address the Jewish question marks its authors and supporters as complicitous in virtue of their silence. The Barman Confessional was a form of protest, but it was a focused protest that overlooked the killing of Jews. Hockenos said, Some postwar critics of Barmen point to a missing “seventh thesis,” which they believe should have embraced Christians of Jewish descent and condemned antisemitism. But these issues were not on the minds of churchmen in 1934. Had a seventh thesis been proposed, it probably would have resulted in an irreconcilable split; the confessing Church was only recently unified and undoubtedly fragile.7

Niemöller appears to have been reticent against the Nazification of the church, but he was not above consenting and participating in the spirit of nationalism that had swept through Germany. While his motives have been questioned by biographers, Niemöller did write from prison on September 1, 1939, to say that he was willing to serve his country in the navy. In terms of complicity this could count as (#3) consent. It seems unlikely that one would count this as (#4) flattery or (#2) counsel. His offer to serve was not accepted, so he could not be faulted with (#6) participation in the war. What is noticeably missing from the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt he crafted shortly after the war on October 19, 1945, was any mention of the persecution and killing of Jews. Again, Niemöller was (#7) silent on that matter of guilt for genocide.

A J. Topf & Sons: Manufacturing Hygiene Niemöller was a decorated veteran of the German Navy, and he was responsible for the deaths of naval combatants during World War I. He could be held liable for killing soldiers in the first world war but not killing innocent civilians. We can safely assume that after the conclusion of World War I Niemöller killed no one. Some would claim that he was indifferent to the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust, but he was not an active (#6) participant in the killing of Jews by Nazis. A number of employees of A. J. Topf & Sons, manufacturers of crematoria ovens, could not make the same claim of non-participation.8 The nature of collectives such as family run corporations requires that moral judges examine the actions or inactions of management and

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principal actors to determine their role in genocide. The one company that shall receive attention here is A. J. Toph & Sons, the manufacturer of crematoria ovens that came to be used on-site in the killing camps of the Holocaust like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Given the hierarchical leadership at A. J. Topf and Sons it would be inappropriate to view it as a collective that was blameworthy for its part in the Holocaust. One must look at the contributions of A. J. Toph and Sons to the Holocaust as a conglomeration of the individual contributions of management and employees to the Holocaust. To a greater extent management was complicitous in the Nazis’ perpetration of the Holocaust, and to a lesser degree employees were complicitous in the perpetration of the Holocaust. The management and in varying degrees the employees were bystanders who count as viciously complicit actors in the Holocaust. Stanton’s stage 7, preparation, is a prelude to persecution or execution. A. J. Toph and Sons like other companies was busy doing what corporations do. They were building inventory. However, they were not building crematoria to sit in a warehouse awaiting orders. Rather they were building crematoria on demand that would meet the specification of the Nazis. The Nazis intended to deploy the inventory for diabolical purposes, and A. J. Topf and Sons could not miss this fact. Together the Nazis and the corporation were entering and passing through the stage of preparation to kill, stage 7 of the stages of genocide. As we review the actions and inactions of employees of A. J. Topf and Sons we will single out three individuals representing three different levels of employment. First, we will consider the activity of an upper-level manager and engineer, Kurt Prufer. Second, we will consider the activity of a skilled fitter, Heinrich Messing. Finally, we will consider the activity of a supposed clerical employee, a typist for the company, Annelie Hessler. It seems unlikely that employees of A. J. Topf & Sons would be faulted for #1 commanding harm. The company was not in a position to give orders that would result in the harm of genocidal killing. The orders issued from the Nazis. Whether employees could be faulted for #4 flattery shall remain open. Management and employees could easily be faulted as satisfying the remaining seven criteria for complicity—#2 counseling harm; #3 consenting to harm; # 5 receiving goods or services as a result of the harm; #6 participating in the harm; #7 remaining silent about the harm; #8 failing to prevent the harm; and #9 failing to denounce the harm. A. J. Topf & Sons was a manufacturing company known for its manufacture of brewery equipment and ovens. Upper management during the

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years under examination—1934 to 1945—included two brothers who bore the family name of Topf—Ludwig and Ernest. Hereafter the company shall be cited as Toph. In 1934 civil cremation was legalized for the hygienic removal of human remains, and Topf was one of the primary manufacturers of civil crematoria, that is, ovens to cremate the dead. These crematoria could be fueled by gas, coke, or coal; and their “muffle” design prevented the bodies from contacting the flames that heated the units. The same law that allowed for civil cremations to occur in Germany stipulated those individuals were to be certified as dead prior to the cremation of their bodies. Also, bodies were to be cremated individually to avoid contamination with the remains of others. These stipulations were intended to preserve the dignity of the deceased. In the initial stages of the Holocaust the Nazis outsourced the cremation of bodies of Jews who had been killed in concentration camps. In other words, they transported bodies to sites where civil crematoria were available. This process had a number of flaws. Transport of bodies risked public exposure of the killing process. In addition, it was impractical for an increase in volume. The practical solution would have been the development of an on-site disposal system, and engineers at Toph rose to the occasion. Portable single chamber crematoria were already available for the asking, and Topf made it known to the SS that the ovens could be had for a price. The SS began buying Topf inventory. If the relation between Topf and the SS went no further than the sale of civil crematoria, perhaps a case could be made that employees or management of Toph were unwittingly complicit. The intervention of senior manager Kurt Prufer ensured that Toph became an exclusive supplier to the SS of customized crematoria. Company records indicate that on May 17, 1937, a mobile, oil-heated oven called an “incineration unit” was designed by Prufer for sale. Though the unit shared the basic design of civil crematoria, its name—incineration unit—is an indication that the unit was intended to be used to dispose of the bodies of individuals murdered by the Nazis. Providing its inventory for the Nazis was a step toward complicity even if that could be dismissed as business as usual. When Prufer created a double muffle oven, that is, a two chambered incineration unit for Dachau he was customizing crematoria to better serve the purposes of the Nazis. Fast forward to January 1945. At that time in Auschwitz alone fifty-two chambers were available for the cremation of bodies of murdered Jews and others. These units could process almost three thousand bodies a day. In

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the years intervening between 1937 and 1945 Topf had done a sizeable amount of business with the SS in supplying the Nazis with on-site multi-­ chamber crematoria for the disposal of bodies, and Toph was not merely marketing available inventory. With the help of Prufer and others Toph was customizing its products the better to serve the Nazis’ genocidal intent. Bartlett observed that an order for Auschwitz filled by Topf on February 1943 included “ovens for Crematorium III and a ventilation system for the gas chamber, an additional waste incinerator for Crematorium II, two lorries for ash transportation and a fumigator to disinfect prisoner’s clothes.”9 Consider how the custom design of multi-unit crematoria by Prufer for the Nazis satisfies several criteria for complicity in the Nazis’ killing of Jews. The multi-unit oven design to eliminate more bodies rapidly was a form of #2 counsel for harm and #3 consent to harm. Receipt of payment for supplying the ovens counts as #5 receipt of goods or services as a result of the harm. Arguably the installation of the ovens on-site could count as a type of #6 participation. Management of the company and many employees knew the purpose of the multi-unit crematoria, but Topf did not make it a matter of public information that they supplied custom units for the incineration of bodies in concentration camps; hence, they were #7 silent about the harm done. The willingness of Topf to continue to provide ovens to the Nazis counts as #8 a failure to prevent harm and #9 a failure to denounce harm. Prufer and other members of Topf’s management satisfied no less than seven of the nine criteria for complicity. As a fitter for the company Heinrich Messing would not have taken part in the manufacturer of airplane parts or grenades. He would not have taken part in the design of the multi-unit crematoria. He may have taken part in their set-up. However, he is remembered for his servicing of the exhaust system of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The demand for a system to incinerate large numbers of corpse was driven by the system of mass murder the Nazis were using, namely, killing masses of people with poison gas. The gas chambers that used Zyklon B to kill hundreds of people at one time were and were not efficient. Hundreds of people could be killed by this method. However, lingering poisonous gas made it impossible to evacuate the gas chamber rapidly. To remedy the problem an exhaust system was designed to pull the gas out of the chamber. The exhaust system vented fresh air into the chamber to allow workers to remove the bodies of the dead. Since Topf employees were employed to install the on-site crematoria, their fitters were called on to service the gas chamber exhaust

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unit. Heinrich Messing was one of the employees who worked overtime to ensure that the exhaust system was working efficiently. His efficient servicing of the exhaust unit on March 13, 1943, made it possible to continue with the gassing operation. Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert jan van Pelt observed, “That same night, 1,492 women, children, and old people, selected from a convoy of 2,000 Jews from the Krakow ghetto, were killed in the new crematorium.”10 Messing would not be faulted for offering #2 counsel for harm. He could be faulted with the six other criteria for complicity that Prufer met: #3 consent to harm; #5 receipt of goods or services in the form of overtime pay; #6 participation in harm in the mechanization of gas chambers for killing; #7 silence about the gas chambers and cremations; #8 failure to prevent the gassing of Jews and others; and #9 failure to denounce the activities. Annelie Hessler is the name assigned here to a typist for Topf during the Holocaust. In Erfurt at the corporate office, a typist would have been far removed from the concentration camps where Prufer or Messing serviced the company wares. Yet, typist’s initials appeared on company correspondence that confirms sales of goods or services of Topf to the SS. The typist’s distance from the concentration camps may suggest she would not meet some criteria for complicity like #3 consent to harm. Mellema suggests that (full) knowledge of a principal actor’s harmful behavior need not be known to establish complicity. Since Hessler was on the Topf payroll, she did meet criteria #5 receipt of goods or services for harm to another. Unless history failed to record her outcry Hessler was #7 silent about the harm of the principal actors. Likewise, Hessler #8 failed to prevent the harm of the principal actors and #9 failed to denounce the harm of the principal actors. If we judge that Hessler was complicitous, then her complicity may approach that of benign complicity. The same cannot be said of the complicity of Prufer or Messing. Their complicity is vicious. They may not have qualified as the principal actors in the harm of genocide, but their complicity served as necessary conditions for the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews and others.

Complicity of the Swastika Bedecked German Church Critics have been quick to criticize churches as bystanders in the Holocaust, but the nature of their wrongdoing is rarely discussed. To add to the discussion, I shall call attention to two aspects of churches’ behavior that are largely overlooked but are significant in the stages of genocide. They are

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(1) the failure to exercise their prophetic voice to denounce the immoral acts contributing to the Holocaust, and (2) the offering of official or clerical services to individuals throughout the Holocaust. These are moral failures of omission and commission. To understand the wrongdoing in the first failure we must revisit the notion of moral judgments. When moral theorists discuss reactions to wrongdoing and untoward behavior, they distinguish moral resentment from moral indignation. Moral indignation may be expressed by those who are indirectly affected by wrongdoing, whereas moral resentment may be expressed by those who directly suffer moral wrongdoing. Moral outrage may be expressed by those who recognize and condemn wrongdoing in cases where they are not immediately affected by the wrongdoing. Victims may express their moral resentment by making it know that they are being wronged. Perpetrators may ignore or fail to count the outcries of victims as significant. Moral resentment and moral indignation can take the form of speech or communication acts that identify victims and perpetrators. Moral resentment may be expressed by victims, but moral indignation may be expressed by individuals or collectives indirectly impacted by the wrong. The family whose disabled member was euthanized in the T-4 campaign would express moral indignation for the wrongdoing. Concerned neighbors would express moral outrage. The actions of perpetrators demonstrate the vice of cruelty, and the expressions of resentment and indignation demonstrate the virtue of caring. It has been suggested that bystanders do enter into the relations of perpetrators and victims. Bystanders are to a greater or lesser extent enmeshed social relations with both perpetrators and victims. Moral luck has thrown them into an unavoidable relationship with both perpetrators and victims. Individual bystanders may be citizens of a sovereign state where genocide is occurring. Collective bystanders can be situated in a sovereign state, or they may be sovereign states themselves. The Lutheran Church of Germany was a collective bystander within the borders of Germany, but the Roman Catholic Church was a social entity independent of Germany sovereignty. Both churches were corporate bystanders with a voice to condemn, condone, or ignore the acts of the Nazis. Bystanders can express moral outrage and moral indignation. While expressions of moral outrage may be suppressed or met with reprisals, the bystanders still have a voice to speak out. With its Holy See located in Rome the Roman Catholic Church was appropriately seen as a collective distinct from the German nation. The

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Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Germany found themselves situated within the precincts of Germany. Their members were German citizens. Yet, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches of German saw themselves as collectives apart from Germany. Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms provided the theological foundation for the view that the Lutheran Church was a collective distinct form the secular, political nation state. In practice it was a state funded church. Churches in Germany did not rise up as collectives to take militant action against the state. Nevertheless, they did have the ability to act or respond to events happening through their prophetic voice. What I shall here label as their prophetic voice is simply the collective voice or opinion that is expressed on behalf of the collective. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope speaks ex cathedra, and that represents the voice or the policy of the collective, that is, the church. This voice that I have called the prophetic voice of the church offers religious and moral judgments. The moral judgments it offers identify the approbation or the condemnation of the collective for morally praiseworthy or blameworthy practices. For instance, if the Pope condemns abortions, then this is a religious and moral statement of condemnation. This power to issue a moral judgment that amounts to a “party line” is significant in that it can influence behaviors of members of the collective. The faithful Roman Catholic may choose to behave in ways that are consistent with the Pope’s condemnation of abortion. The influence of the collective’s voice can be complicitous, and it can encourage complicity. Given the power of religious collectives to exercise their prophetic voice, it is important to understand what they say and what they leave unsaid. Their omissions may be as complicitous as their moral judgments. During the “Church Struggle” the Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Germany were split into two bodies with distinct loyalties—the German Church and the Confessing Church. The German Church supported the Nazi government and its policies while the Confessing Church opposed the Nazification of the church. The former supported the discriminatory practices of the Nuremberg Laws, and the latter opposed them to the extent that they impacted persons of shared faith. A number of Lutheran churches demonstrated that they could constitute themselves as a collective capable of both passive resistance and outspoken opposition to Nazi policies adopted by the German church. First, they demonstrated they could passively resist the implementation of Nazi racial discrimination. Kyle Jantzen says, “[The Emergency League] was

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formed in protest against the German Christian demand that the Aryan Paragraph, which banned Jews from careers in civil service, be applied in the churches… By the beginning of 1934, at least seven thousand ministers had signed on.”11 The Emergency League demonstrated that Lutheran churches could organize themselves in a collective act of resistance. Second, the collective of churches that became identified as the confessing Church demonstrated that they could both defy the total Nazification of the church by their ability to organize and survive. The Synod of Barmen that emerged in May 1934, created the Barman Confession that became a theological rallying cry against the German Church. Pastors freely associating with the Confessing Church were able to win the support of congregations so that local parishes were not won over to the German Church. Third, the Confessing Church was positioned to express moral indignation toward some of the Nazi practices that resulted in the murder of innocents in connection with T-4. T-4 was the code name for a Nazi pogrom designed to purify Germany by euthanizing its physically and mentally handicapped citizens. The program was ended in 1941 due to individual protests and the international attention it attracted. In December 1940, while the program was still active, Pope XII issued a statement denouncing the program that actively killed innocents as a means to achieve racial purity. 12 The Pope’s statement may be viewed as a collective’s condemnation of the euthanasia of the handicapped citizens of Germany. In contrast, few pastors in the Confessing Church spoke against the practice before its official end in 1941. While the Confessing Church issued no official statement on the practice, Bishop von Galen of Munster did openly denounce the practice, and his popularity and public notoriety spared him from direct reprisals from the Nazis.13 After 1941 innocents continued to be killed in spite of the official end of the program. In 1943 the Twelfth Prussian Confessing Church Synod created a document for its Day of Repentance and Prayer that did condemn the practice of killing handicapped individuals.14 The declaration did condemn the state for its euthanasia program after its official termination. Jantzen observed that in addition to the fear of reprisals, theological and congregational disputes consumed the attention and energies of pastors in the three precincts he investigated. Jantzen said, “Pastors were also very often too preoccupied with their own struggle to preserve the independence of their church institutions and to defend theological truth that they neglected to challenge the social and political attitudes of the Third

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Reich, or to aid the victims of Nazi persecution.”15 By directing their attention to internal disputes these collectives failed to make use of their prophetic voice to condemn the acts of the Nazis. Hockenos observed that pastors and in general Lutherans were willing to come to the aid of Jews who were baptized, Jews married to Christians, and members of the clergy who may have one or more Jewish grandparents. In defending these persons Lutherans individually were defending their own. To the extent that they opposed the euthanizing of the handicapped they were again expressing care for their own. What Hockenos, Jantzen, and others did not find was that Lutherans or Reformed Churches as collectives were defending Jews who were not in some way affiliated with their faith. For unconverted Jews the prophetic voice of the collective remained mute. Implicitly these churches were recognizing the sovereignty of Germany to dictate the rights of its citizens, while they were defending the rights of the citizens of Luther’s kingdom. When one is complicitous one bears a lesser degree of responsibility for untoward action. The complicitous may contribute materially to an outcome, contribute instrumentally to an outcome, or contribute sympathetically to an outcome. The supplier of goods, arms, or ordinances provides the substantive means for the perpetrator to achieve his or her goal. The worker provides the practical means for the perpetrator to achieve his or her goal. The sympathetic provides the moral support, that is, the social endorsement for the perpetrator to achieve his or her goal. One could be complicitous in fact without knowledge thereof, since one could supply the material means needed for a perpetrator to achieve a desired objective without knowing the end of its use. Analysis of an individuals’ actions and intentions should disclose if the individual is complicitous and knows this. Likewise, analysis of a collectives’ actions and intentions should disclose if the collective is complicitous. By their silence the state churches of Germany were lending their moral support to the campaign of genocide. One of the three religious bodies under consideration should count as complicitous if not also a perpetrator, and that is the German Church. The German Church’s aggressive endorsement of the NASDP qualified it as a sympathetic contributor to its genocidal programs. Within its own sphere of influence, it actively enforced the policies supportive of the Aryan paragraph. It expelled clergy from its ranks who could not demonstrate their pure Aryan pedigree. It refused the sacraments for non-Aryans even if they were baptized.

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In religious life the perpetuation of rituals is no insignificant practice. The administration of sacraments by clergy such as baptisms, communion, and funerals, and the convening of religious assemblies are fundamental activities in the Christian religion. For religious purposes these services may be withheld as an act of condemnation or discipline of individuals seeking the services. By its offering the Nazis these services the German church was taking a business-as-usual attitude that would implicate this collective religion as complicitous. If other churches offered these services without reserve, they were likewise complicitous. Clergy in the German Church did not refuse to serve soldiers or individuals supportive of the war and the Holocaust. By making available its sacraments and services without reserve, the church was providing a support system for the killing of Jews. Consider the psychological and spiritual support that was available to an individual who was granted access to Catholic confession or protestant communion. Both absolution for past wrongdoing and blessing for state service were promised through one or both of these sacraments. A solider or non-combatant could work within a concentration camp all week, come to a church service and receive the sacraments and remain in good standing in the church. Upon receiving the sacraments, the murderers could convince themselves that they had done their “Christian duty.” Christian scholars know that within the teachings of the Gospels one may finds support for both pacifism and militant resistance. The German Church did not take up arms against the allies, nor did it take up arms against the Jews. It was a religious organization and not a military body. It did readily enforce the implicit restrictions against Jews in the Aryan paragraph. While the church as a collective did not burn synagogues or incarcerate Jews, its endorsement of Nazi policy and propaganda were indirect endorsements of hate speech against Jews. Promotion of hate speech happens in first and second stages of genocide. The German Lutheran Church did endorse National Socialism and was willing to conform itself to its ideals. While it may not have created war hawks, it did not actively condemn their practice.

Complicity of the Silent Neighboring Nations Collectives such as states confront a basic decision about human rights. Do they recognize and assume a cosmopolitan view of human rights, or do they recognize the sovereignty of nations? In other words, do human

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rights supersede the authority of nation states or are human rights subordinated to the authority of nation states? The realpolitik answer to the question is that human rights are subordinated to the authority of nation states. Historians have asked and attempted to answer the question: Why did the Allies not bomb the rail lines used to transport Jews into killing camps like Auschwitz, if they knew what was happening in the camps? Some have argued that the intelligence briefings on the killing of Jews were incredible or inconclusive so that no action could be justified. Others have argued that other military priorities took precedence. What remains evident is that the Allies did not intervene in decisive ways to halt the genocidal killing that was happening in these camps. If nonintervention is taken to be a form of silence, then the nonintervention of allies counts as complicity in the genocidal killing unless there was an overriding reason not to intervene. It is possible that the lack of action stemmed not from a lack of information but from a prior ideological judgment about human rights and their enforcement. Collectives who saw themselves as entities distinct from the German people had to make a fundamental judgment about human rights and state sovereignty. Collectives such as England and America implicitly or explicitly accepted or rejected the notion that the sovereignty of a nation trumped the rights of its citizens. It is evident that during the early years of the Nazi rule America was reluctant to intervene in the affairs of Germany. This indifference was set aside when America entered the war. Eventually its troops did rescue survivors in the killing camps. Whether this represented a change of heart or if it was a military expediency remains for historians to determine. What seems incontrovertible is the fact that America did not decisively intervene to stop the murder of Jews in the killing camps by actions like the bombing of rail lines. Engagement in war is a statement about how America viewed its treatment of Germany. The mass killing of Jews had begun months before America entered the war, and this alone did not precipitate the declaration of war. If a collective such as America implicitly or explicitly accepted a cosmopolitan notion of the rights of humans rather than a realpolitik notion of state sovereignty, then sovereignty could provide only a false justification for the abuse of the rights of citizens by a sovereign state. In other words, a collective that would adopt a cosmopolitan notion of the rights of humans would have reason to condemn the abuse of human rights at any time on any soil, and the collective would judge that a sovereign state was not justified in treating its citizens however it chose. By its failure to condemn what was

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happening in Germany America was implicitly recognizing the sovereignty of Germany to govern its citizens and to subordinate their rights to the state. Collectives confront a basic decision about human rights. Do they recognize and assume a cosmopolitan view of human rights, or do they recognize the sovereignty of nations? In other words, do human rights supersede the authority of nation states or are human right subordinated to the authority of nation states? The realpolitik answer to the question is that human rights are subordinated to the authority of nation states. The single issue given attention here is that of Allies did not bomb Auschwitz or the rail lines leading into the camp. On the one hand, bombing Auschwitz is a historical non-event; and on the other hand, it is a moral omission. In his article, “American and the Bombing of Auschwitz: The Importance of Asking the Right Questions,” historian Edward Shapiro asks a series of questions regarding the failure of allies to bomb Auschwitz.16 These questions may be distinguished as first order questions about the practicality of the operation and second order questions about the morality of the implied operation. What I identify as Shapiro’s first order questions are pragmatic considerations frequently asked regarding the feasibility of the bombing of Auschwitz. Shapiro asks, how many Jews would escape if the bombing happened? Would this require that resources necessary for winning the war be repurposed so that it weakened Allies ability to fight? These first order questions aim to calculate the cost versus the benefit of bombing the rail lines or the camps. They imply that the right or wrong of the operation is to be determined by a utilitarian calculus. The historic fact that Allies did not move forward with the plan indicates two possibilities. Either the utilitarian calculation favored non-action or there was some other value that supervened in the decision not to bomb. I would suggest that it was the latter case. Values other than utilitarian outcomes motivated Allies not to bomb Auschwitz. What I identify as Shapiro’s second order questions focus upon the nature of states and their moral obligations to peers. Shapiro asks, “what role can one expect moral considerations to play in the formulation of diplomatic and military policy, and have critics of the Allies proposed a standard of behavior which no nation is likely to live up to.”17 The first of two questions I shall identify as the moral considerations question, and the second of two I identify as the possibly unattainable behavioral expectations question. The possibly unattainable behavioral expectations question

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implies that some moral obligations cannot be fulfilled. An example of an unattainable behavioral expectation could be the expectation that a single state should become the “police officer” of the globe. This objection of unattainable outcomes is raised against teleological theories that always aim for the ultimate ends. Agents exhaust themselves if they must work ceaselessly to achieve the ends. However, that may not be a genuine problem if the answer to Shapiro’s question of possibly unattainable behavioral expectations is dependent on the answer to Shapiro’s moral considerations question. What moral obligations can states expect states to fulfill? I would argue that moral standards of behavior for states is contingent upon a state’s adaptation of absolute sovereignty or a state’s commitment to humanitarian rights. In a realpolitik view of a state’s sovereignty the state stipulates the standards it will uphold. In the Holocaust the totalitarian state of Nazi Germany stipulated that its primary directive was valuing and promoting the Aryan race. Nazi Germany refused to answer to any higher authority such as natural law or an international bill of human rights. Bystander states that remained silent acted as if the Nazis’ claim to sovereignty was above reproach. State sovereignty provided an unacceptable excuse for moral wrongdoing. America and neighboring states became complicitous during the time they knew about the mass murders and failed to intervene, since they were #7 silent, #8 failed to prevent the killing, and #9 failed to condemn the harm. By their noninterference, they were licensing Nazis to kill persons whom they claimed to be enemies of the state, namely, Jews, Roma, and others.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the many ways that bystanders could be complicit in the perpetrator’s wrongdoing. Four examples were offered. Martin Niemöller qualified as a bystander who was an Aryan in good standing, until he spoke out against Nazi’s policies against the church. Then he became a bystander who suffered along with the victims of the Nazis. By comparison employees of Toph and Sons were bystanders whose contributions to the Nazis agenda were vital. Cooperation and support of the employees was complicitous on several levels. With its Holy See located in Rome the Roman Catholic Church was a collective distinct from the German nation. The Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Germany found themselves situated within the precincts of Germany. Their members were German citizens. Any of these churches as

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collectives could have condemned the genocide that was happening in Germany under the Nazis. While collectives such as churches may not have mobilized themselves to actively resist Nazis, they did have the ability to act or respond to events happening through their prophetic voice. This voice that I have called the prophetic voice of the church offers religious and moral judgments. The moral judgments it offers identify the approbation of the collective for morally praiseworthy practices or condemnation of blameworthy practices. This power of churches to issue a moral judgment is significant in that it can influence behaviors of members of the collective. Given the power of religious collectives to exercise their prophetic voice, it is important to understand what they say and what they leave unsaid. Their omissions may be as complicitous as their moral judgments. During the “Church Struggle” the Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Germany were split into two bodies with distinct loyalties—the German Church and the Confessing Church. The German Church supported the Nazi government and its policies while the Confessing Church opposed the Nazification of the church. Neither church as a body expressed moral outrage toward the events that were happening in the Holocaust. These cases beautifully illustrate how bystanders serve critical roles in a society undergoing a genocide. Churches and neighboring nations were bystanders, and as bystanders they failed to condemn the wrongdoing they saw happening in the Holocaust. They too were complicitous in the wrongdoing. Bystanders amid a genocide may appeal to ignorance or an inability to act to exonerate themselves from the wrongdoing. No one of the four bystanders identified here could plead ignorance of the wrongdoings, and each was able to act in decisive ways to express moral indignation and outrage.

Notes 1. Anthony Apia, “Racism and Moral Pollution,” The Philosophical Forum 18 (2–3, 1986): 187. 2. Gregory Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 3. 3. Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability, 4. 4. Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability, 10.

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5. Matthew D.  Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis. First edition (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 135. 6. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me, 148. 7. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me, 110. 8. See “A Perfectly Normal Company”. https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/ en/exhibitions/permanent_exhibitions/the_engineers/128598.html. 9. Karen Bartlett, Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 159. 10. Bartlett, Architects of Death, 159. 11. Kyle Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2008), 5. 12. Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and “the Final Solution” (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 163. The role of Pope Pius XII is not discussed at length in this volume. His complicity is discussed in Killian McDonnell, “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: Fear of Reprisals and Generic Diplomacy.” Gregorianum 83 (2, 2002): 313–34. For an in-depth analysis of his complicity see David I.  Kertzer, The pope at war: the secret history of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022). 13. Bergan, The Banality of Evil, 164. 14. Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany, 108. 15. Jantzen, Faith and the Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany, p. 109. 16. Edward Shapiro, “America and the Bombing of Auschwitz: The Importance of Asking the Right Questions,” Society, 56 (6, 2019): 625–33. 17. Shapiro, “America and the Bombing of Auschwitz,” 626.

CHAPTER 12

Cry Genocide!

Introduction1 This chapter is a plea and a call to action. Within the stages of genocide, the cry of genocide can be an early propaedeutic warning, or it can be a late game indebtment. In the previous chapters I have divided the stages into the priming phase of genocide and the peak phase of genocide.2 There we have seen how identification, discrimination, or dehumanization were necessary but not sufficient causes of genocide. When these behaviors are happening, it is not too early to say that the contributing causes of genocide are happening. Historically these contributing causes of genocide have signaled genocidal priming is moving toward the peak phase of genocide. As Primo Levi argued: it happened before, and it could happen again. The label “genocide” emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. After years of campaigning, Raphael Lemkin succeeded in gaining international recognition for the term “genocide.” The term identified a peculiar type of mass atrocity that aimed at the annihilation of an ethnic group. The proper use of the term in historic and contemporary communications is a considerable undertaking, since it identifies not only a peculiar type of conflict but also the role of actors in that conflict. Genocide may or may not happen in global wars or civil wars. In genocide some actors are victims, and other actors are perpetrators. Since the deployment of the term is likely to result in the blame of some and the exculpation of others, it is a term that must be used judiciously and for the betterment of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_12

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society. When properly deployed it can be an effective deterrent to halt ongoing genocide or to prevent an imminent genocide. On April 24, 2021, during the “Armenian Remembrance Day” ceremony, United States President Joe Biden called the mass murder of Armenians in 1915 a genocide.3 This declaration marked a considerable change in outlook toward the mass atrocity that happened 106 years previously. To declare an incident a genocide is to tag persons as victims and perpetrators. No sooner than the declaration was made individuals began to react with praise or blame for the declaration. Surviving descendants of Armenians who were killed in the mass murders felt vindicated. Turkish citizens who were successors of the Ottoman empire reported they were offended by the declaration. Raising a fire alarm is a serious action. In a crowded building you wouldn’t glibly raise your voice and cry, “Fire!” Most major municipalities have an ordinance governing true and false fire alarms, and those ordinances stipulate that the second false alarm shall result in a fine. This study invites the listener to consider a protocol for raising the cry of genocide. Like sounding a fire alarm, the protocol for raising the cry of genocide may be governed not only by prudence but also by morality. A long-awaited dream of Raphael Lemkin was achieved on December 11, 1946, when the United Nations declared genocide to be “a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world.”4 Lemkin is credited with coining the term “genocide,” and he was largely responsible for lobbying the U.N. to recognize it as a crime. Lemkin wrote “genocide has always existed in history.”5 President Biden was not speaking anachronistically, when he declared the mass murder of Armenians to be a genocide. Nonetheless, it took considerable work in the twentieth century to distinguish genocide from other significant harms to humanity such as mass murder. By international law genocide is a crime, and by moral reasoning it can be seen as a morally blameworthy harm, but what sort of harm or wrongdoing is genocide? The term genocide combines two fundamental elements: “geno” for people and “cide” for destruction.6 By definition genocide is the destruction of a people, that is, an ethnic group. In most instances this may have been achieved by mass murder, but genocide is not confined to destruction by murder. Lemkin was adamant that genocide can take the form of physical destruction, biological destruction, or social destruction of an ethnic group.7 If genocide is unchecked the outcome is

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either the complete extermination of an ethnic group or its social degradation or both. While genocide is recognized as a crime against humanity by an international tribunal, the U. N., I shall discuss it as a morally blameworthy harm. Genocide is not necessarily a mortal harm. Not all crimes perpetrated against humanity are mortal crimes, and not all morally blameworthy harms performed against humans are mortal harms. Some acts of genocide are mortal harms, and others are not. Perpetrators of genocide may rely not only on killing but also on violent acts such as sterilization and rape to achieve their intended destruction. Sterilization ensures that there cannot be future offspring of those people sterilized, and rape resulting in impregnation ensures that no pure blood line in an ethnic group is preserved. Implicit in the notion of genocide is the value of both bodily life and a cultural way of life. Genocide may end the mortal lives of a people by mass murder, while cultural disruptions of various types can end the social life of an ethnic group. If an ethnic group finds its identity not in its biological basis but in its “way-of-life,” then with minimal loss of life cultural genocide may still be achieved, that is, the cultural destruction of an ethnic group. For example, confining a nomadic tribe of Native Americans to a territorial reservation could destroy their way of life. Likewise, destruction of their sacred shrines and territories may so disrupt their way of life that it would become practically impossible to carry on that way of life. The cry of genocide is a descriptive cry and a prescriptive cry. It describes an act or set of acts that are intentionally destructive of either human life or human culture. It prescribes that the action toward the victims be condemned as genocidal or condoned as not being genocidal. Where the act or series of acts brings about a loss of life, it follows that the outcry prescribes the moral condemnation of the act or acts. The outcry says some action is genocidal and it ought not to be happening. Genocide is perpetrated by violence that aims at the destruction of an ethnic group. Destruction of that ethnic group is not necessarily achieved by means of mortal harm. The biological basis of the ethnic group can be corrupted beyond repair, or the cultural basis of the group can be so disrupted it defies reassembly. So, the resulting logical relations follow: All acts of genocide are morally blameworthy acts against humanity. Not all morally blameworthy acts against humanity are mortal harms. Some acts of genocide are mortal harms performed against humanity, and some acts of genocide are not mortal harms performed against humanity.

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When and Why to Give the Cry: “Genocide!” A single person or a collective may become the voice of the cry of genocide. As he began his appeal to members of the U.N. Lemkin was that single voice until he successfully lobbied for others to join the outcry. Lemkin said in the opening lines of his project that he intended to identify instances of genocide past. This study focuses upon the value of raising the cry before or during an outbreak of genocidal action. The value of raising a cry of genocide after the fact should not be underestimated, though this is not the focus of the present chapter. Raising the cry of genocide after the fact may have value historically and it may confirm the judgment of moral blameworthiness for past actions. Scholars and advocates who dedicate their efforts to the prevention of genocide can discover in historic cases early warning signs of genocidal priming that preceded full-blown genocide. Likewise, the proper identification of past instances of genocide could prompt reparations for wrongs committed. For instance, reparations are being made by the state of North Carolina to survivors of a eugenics program that targeted some individuals for sterilization. This has not been identified as an instance of genocide. If it were so identified, then it could serve as a deterrent to future eugenics campaigns that aim to eradicate a specific population. Raising the cry of genocide should prevent harm rather than precipitate harm, but that is not always the case. Those who engage in genocidal acts most often describe their behavior in euphemistic terms. Perpetrators may raise a disguised cry of genocide to solicit support from sympathizers. Sympathizers would find the cry an endorsement of hostilities and violence toward the intended victims. Recall how the Nazis’ “Final Solution” acted as a rallying cry for the elimination of Jews. That document says, In the course of the final solution and under appropriate leadership, the Jews should be put to work in the East. In large, single-sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately…8

To call the Final Solution a thinly veiled proclamation of genocide is an understatement. The plan anticipates that most Jews sent to Nazi run work camps would succumb to starvation, overwork, or exposure to the

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elements. The solution proved to be a plan to exterminate Jews in central Europe and elsewhere, and the Nazis may be seen as perpetrators caught in the act of committing genocide. It is evident that the solution targets Jews for elimination, that is, death through intolerable conditions at the labor camps. The solution contains a euphemistic promise that survivors of work details “will be dealt with appropriately.” Readers who are familiar with the Nazis’ treatment of Jews will understand this statement to refer to the execution of the survivors. The emblazoned promise on Auschwitz’s entryway, “Work will make you Free,” was a veiled promise that Nazis would work prisoners to death. The Nazis’ final solution was blatant, overt, and intentional, and it may count as an instance of raising the cry with a morally blameworthy intention that would precipitate harm. To raise the cry of genocide to avoid harm or to prevent further harm is to solicit help in stopping genocide. The speaker must understand the available vehicles for communicating this information to mobilize help in its various forms. Help can come in the form of resistance of force, and the right to defend (R2D) has been deemed a justifiable use of force by some international tribunals such as the United Nations.9 The most efficient early intervention should be able both to stop short of reliance on retaliatory violence and to prevent genocide. Since the outcry is both informative and persuasive, those who cry genocide must strategically time its use. If perpetrators do use the outcry, they may solicit partners in their reign of terror. To use the outcry for good it must both inform the hearers and persuade them of the harm of genocidal action. In moral agents whose sense of care and empathy are properly developed the outcry may elicit moral revulsion. So, the outcry of genocide has the potential to evoke moral revulsion, call attention to victims’ moral outrage, and promote a broad-based opposition better prepared to meet the threat of genocide. The outcry of genocide may be addressed to mass media, to social media including those dedicated to upholding the rights and welfare of humanity, or to conventional audiences of many or of one. Through mass media such as television, radio, and newsprint the outcry can come to the attention of international tribunals such as the U.N. Social media found on the internet that would be receptive to the outcry may be classified as social media dedicated to the pursuit of justice, and the cry may also be promoted on non-dedicated or general social media. Examples of justice seeking or dedicated social media on the internet include Movements (movements.org); Human Rights Watch (humanrightswatch.org); and

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Amnesty International (amnestyinternational.org). General social media where the outcry may be raised include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Finally, the outcry can be addressed to conventional audiences such as clubs; religious assemblies like churches, synagogues, or mosques; and in private conversations. It seems likely that John G. Heidenrich would count the outcry of genocide as a form of diplomatic pressure. In his book, How to Prevent Genocide, Heidenrich suggests that there is an incremental sequence of diplomatic steps that are nonviolent and precede the use of retaliatory force to stop genocide. I shall liken these nonviolent diplomatic steps to a series of toll booths with increasingly higher tolls. Payment could be counted as the number of lives lost. The tolls continue to rise as long as genocide is perpetrated with an increasing loss of life. The opening step is quiet diplomacy, and the endpoint is full-blown publicity. Between the beginning point of quiet diplomacy and the end point of full-blown publicity are several steps of nonviolent diplomacy that may be deployed such as verbal maneuvering, friendly and unfriendly warnings, moral and material support of opposition, breaking diplomatic ties, and publicity locally and internationally.10 If non-violent diplomacy proves to be effective, then the earlier that non-violent steps of diplomacy raise the outcry of genocide the more effective may be the campaign to reduce the death tolls or cultural destruction.

The Choice to Give the Cry: “Genocide!” At public airports, passengers and the public are admonished through public announcements not to leave their bags unattended and to report any suspicious activity. Airport administration hopes these simple steps mobilize a population that could otherwise become bystanders to acts of terrorism or human trafficking. Not only is speaking up seen as a prudent course of action, but it is also seen as one’s patriotic duty. Perhaps a better understanding of the cry of genocide could result in the idea that it is one’s moral duty to raise the cry. In his book, The Psychology of Genocide¸ Steven K. Baum offers a characterization of three classes of actors—perpetrators of genocide, rescuers of genocide, and bystanders to genocide. There is an implicit fourth class of actors in a lexicon of genocide, and that is the victims of genocide. If these three or four types of actors do best describe how actors relate to the problem of genocide, can any further distinctions be made among these actors?

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I suppose that for each type of actor in genocide there are gradations of involvement that would warrant more or less praise or blame depending on the actor’s relationship to genocidal acts. In other words, some perpetrators could be directly responsible for the slaying of thousands. Other perpetrators would be responsible only for acts that indirectly supported genocide such as maintaining the German rail lines that have instrumental value for both the supply of food to German citizens and soldiers and the transport of prisoners. Also, victims may be caught a web of complicity that inflicts harm on other victims as they are forced to comply with the demands of the perpetrators. Regarding the variable responsibility of bystanders Baum asks, “Who becomes what kind of bystander and why and how do they differ from the perpetrators and rescuer counterparts?”11 Both perpetrators and rescuers are to be identified by the actions they perform. Bystanders not acting under coercion are not identifiable by their positive action per se. The action and omissions of bystanders has been discussed in an earlier chapter. In addition, victims acting under duress are not identifiable as free agents of their actions. Earlier it was suggested that perpetrators could use the cry for perverse ends. Reluctant or uncommitted perpetrators could find in the outcry reason to actively support other perpetrators. In discussions of the Holocaust, some may suppose that all members of the Wehrmacht or similar German military units were perpetrators, but this would be a false assumption. Guenter Lewy says, “We know of eighty-five cases of members of the Wehrmacht who actually refused orders to execute civilians or prisoners of war. We can assume that the majority of these refusals were motivated by the desire not to have to kill defenseless human beings.”12 Though too few availed themselves of the choice to opt out of killing, it was possible for military personnel to refuse to kill others if they lacked “strong conviction.” These were individuals whose constitution would not allow them to kill another person even if they were acting under orders. Likewise, individuals could declare that they chose to opt out on religious grounds. Opting out of killing was possible, but protest or obstruction of killing was not tolerated.13 Hearing the outcry of genocide could persuade the reluctant and the indecisive to opt out of the killing process. It seems likely that if those opting out were to join in the cry of genocide, it would be seen as evidence of insubordination. While opting out was a form of passive resistance, also raising the cry would constitute a form of active resistance.

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In Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, not only local citizens but also victims preformed forced labor. Victims as well as bystanders were manipulated to complete the tasks assigned by perpetrators. Jews who were responsible for supervising other Jews were identified as Kapos. To delay their inevitable killing these individuals would supervise the work forces in the camps. Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, described how some Jews were corrupted by their selection to supervise their fellow prisoners. He said, If one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post.14

The cry of genocide aims to identify those responsible for killing as perpetrators, but the process of identification is complicated when killing happens at a distance or indirectly. When Jews were killed with bullets, perpetrators could more easily be identified as the shooters. When carbon monoxide or Zyklon B was used to kill Jews in factory-fashion, the perpetrators were not so easily identified. In criminal proceedings administering gas was not considered to be the same sort of direct and personal contact that happened when a soldier shot an unarmed civilian. For instance, Gustav Munzburger was notorious for his cruel treatment of Jews as he forced them to enter a gas chamber in Treblinka. When he underwent trial for his participation in the deaths of approximately three hundred thousand Jews, the court ruled that he was merely an accomplice who worked in the “machinery of extermination.”15 In the twenty-first century, we are familiar with weapons of mass destruction. One can press a button and kill thousands if not millions. However, in the Holocaust Nazi perpetrators could not have been successful in their efforts to kill Jews without the active participation of either non-military personnel or victims. Lewy said, “In each of the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinks, no more than twenty to thirty-five Germans supervised some 700 to 1,000 Jewish inmates and 90 to 130

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Ukranians. The fact that much of the work in the extermination factories was done by others served as an excuse by German defendants at post-war trials.”16 In many instances bystanders or victims outnumbered perpetrators. Perpetrators may have promoted the false notion that they were invincible or that the victims and bystanders were helpless and incapable of mounting resistance. The cry of genocide is informative, evocative, and empowering. When victims justifiably raise the cry, it demonstrates that they are not altogether powerless. The cry identifies the action of the perpetrators as intentional harm that is blameworthy. If perpetrators can use a thinly veiled cry of genocide to advertise their agenda, rescuers can raise the outcry of genocide as an effective counterbalance. Rescuers have an interest in ensuring that genocide be avoided, lives be saved, and cultures not be destroyed. Even victims can raise an outcry in hopes of being heard by rescuers or in hopes of compelling some perpetrators to opt out. Could bystanders raise the outcry of genocide? Victoria Barnett has done extensive study on the phenomenon of the bystander. In her book, Bystanders, she points out that the residents of Mauthausen knew that the Nazis were building concentration camps in their neighborhood and engaging in genocidal acts. Barnett says, “The genocide of the European Jews would have been impossible without the active participation of bystanders to carry it out and the failure of numerous parties to intervene to stop it.”17 In this instance Barnett sees the bystanders in the community at Mauthausen as active participants, but were they? She supposes that without the participation of bystanders as supporting laborers the events at the Mauthausen concentration camp could not have had their disastrous outcomes. Ironically, perpetrators may even have counted on bystanders to fail to act as rescuers. If bystanders were simply to raise the outcry, they would cease to appear to be indifferent to the plight of the victims. Perpetrators have counted on bystanders to remain indifferent to the fate of the victims. The supposed neutrality of bystanders allows perpetrators to achieve their desired end with minimal resistance. Without action bystanders do not uphold the side of the victim. Bystanders are supposed to be both indifferent and to be non-participants in genocide, but is that necessarily so? To answer that we must determine both the degree of involvement of bystanders in genocide and if they are truly non-actors in the face of genocide. Barnett and others like Baum want to argue that bystanders are not necessarily innocents even if they are non-participants. To determine the

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degree of involvement of a bystander in genocide one must determine if the bystander is a remote or an immediate bystander. Bystanders may not be absolutely innocent as incompetent persons are thought to be innocent. I suggest that the bystander’s innocence may be contingent upon a number of practical barriers. Spatial and temporal distance from acts of genocide pose practical barriers to involvement, and lack of information may pose a noetic barrier. Remote bystanders may bear little or no responsibility for some acts of genocide, but proximity accompanied by knowledge increase bystanders’ responsibility. Consider a most unwelcome supposition that a new genocidal conflict erupts today between surviving Hutu and Tutsi residents in Rwanda. A citizen of the United States residing in a rural community in the southern Appalachian Mountains may have no spatial contact with fighting residents of Rwanda engaged in genocidal acts even if he or she is their contemporary. While social media could remove some of the practical and noetic barriers of bystanders’ proximity to genocide, it remains unclear whether a remote bystander bears a significant responsibility for the conflict. For immediate bystanders these exculpating circumstances would not apply. The rural mountain dweller is relatively innocent of the imagined conflict in Rwanda. Citizens of Rwanda or other neighboring nations in Africa not engaged in genocide as perpetrators or rescuers may count as immediate bystanders, and they could not rely on the excuse of remoteness. The degree of blame to be placed upon perpetrators of genocide is contingent upon their participation in acts of genocide. The degree of praise to be given to rescuers is likewise contingent upon their resistance to and thwarting of acts of genocide. Were bystanders to act to aid and abet either perpetrators or rescuers they would cease to be bystanders. The difference that may allow bystanders to be distinguished from either perpetrators or rescuers may be their inaction or their omissions. By their actions perpetrators give reason to raise a cry of genocide. Rescuers either raise the cry of genocide or act as if the cry were raised. Immediate bystanders are strategically positioned to raise the cry of genocide, but if they omit the outcry, they fail to condemn the action of the perpetrators or condone the action of the rescuers; and they are blameworthy for their omission of the cry of genocide. Recall from Chap. 1 the moral judgments regarding the role of ethicists and philosophers in the face of genocide. Philosopher and ethicist John K.  Roth claimed that both philosophers and ethicists are positioned to know social and moral wrongdoing and to speak out against it. Heidegger

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was faulted for his silence in the face of an evident wrong in his generation. Recall from Chap. 11 the observation that clergy and churches had a prophetic voice that they could use to express moral outrage and to condemn evident wrongdoing in their respective generation, but for the most part they failed to raise a cry of protest. Heidegger chose to be a loyal member of the NASDP. Pope Pius XII chose to bless Nazi troops going into the theater of war and to say nothing when Jews of Rome were deported to killing camps.18 Though they were informed both Heidegger and Pope Pius XII chose not to raise the cry of genocide, and for this omission history and morality condemn their silence.

Some Risks in Raising the Cry of Genocide An objector may argue that raising the cry of genocide places potential victims and bystanders at significant risk. For victims the outcry may hasten the cycle of violence and killing. Perpetrators eager to silence the outcry may redouble their efforts to eliminate the victims. Possible victims must weigh the risk of suffering swift reprisals against the possibility that the outcry could benefit them. The possible benefits could take the form of the intervention from rescuers, of the uncommitted abandoning their support of committed perpetrators, or of bystanders giving up their indifference and coming to the aid of the potential victims. Objectors may find the obligation unreasonable for bystanders, since raising the cry may place bystanders at risk of suffering from retaliation. The supposed risk is that the bystanders who object could be subject to the same violence as the victims of genocide. This danger is real and is not unlike the danger of retaliation facing whistle blowers. However, that does not necessarily relieve bystanders of an obligation to raise the cry of genocide. It may be prudent for bystanders to reflect upon the cost of raising the cry, if their own lives would be at risk; but dismissing the obligation to raise the cry of genocide in cases where the bystander would not suffer mortal harm seems to be a mistaken response. It is possible that the risk of retaliation could be neutralized, if a sizable number of bystanders were to raise the cry of genocide. The bystander or victim who would choose to raise a cry of genocide does place himself or herself at risk. If the bystander or victim had opportunity to appraise the risk of raising the cry, then he or she would have to consider no less than three factors; (1) the likelihood of retaliation, (2) the

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possibility of gathering allies to assist in raising the cry; and (3) the likelihood of being heard by others who would intervene. Retaliation is a serious risk for the individual who would raise the cry, but it is not an inevitability. In some instances, the resistor may be exposed and vulnerable to retaliation with no effective means of self-defense. In other instances, retaliation may be a threat that never materializes. First Lieutenant Albert Battell not only refused to murder Jews, but he also engaged in subversive acts designed to thwart attacks on Jews. Though his superiors officially reprimanded him, he suffered no further reprisals. The threat of retaliation is real, but someone who is committed to the cause of justice may choose to test the threat knowing that it may also be a bluff. Battell’s insubordination demonstrated how the threat of retaliation might prove to be a bluff. Retaliation is not an inevitability.19 The individual who cries out risks acting alone. Whether he or she can gather allies or if not remains uncertain. If the same person succeeds in recruiting allies, then the cry may be heard more easily. The voice of a mass is harder to silence than the voice of a single individual. When the victim or bystander appraises the risk, he or she must reckon with the likelihood that others will join them in raising the cry. Finally, the crier must determine if anyone is listening or cares. Lemkin worked tirelessly to ensure that the international community was prepared to recognize genocide as a crime against humanity. As a result, the international community of the U.N. is prepared to recognize the cry when it is raised from within its lines of communication. In this well-defined circle of nations, the right to defend (R2D) is sanctioned as an appropriate way to reply to the threat of genocide. That says the international community is listening to its own voice, and it is prepared to support its members to resist genocide. Lemkin’s success came too late to relieve the problems of the Jews in the Holocaust. The fact that it did not prevent further genocides such as those in Cambodia or in Rwanda suggests that the cries of victims in those communities were ignored. Therefore, those who raise the cry of genocide must gauge the readiness of communities or organizations like the U.N. to hear the cries of genocide. Those who choose to raise the cry must determine whether anyone is listening to their cry and if the listeners will be prepared to respond. Baum observes that no one condition creates genocide, and no single factor produces bystanders to genocide.20 While bystanders may be drawn

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into genocide unintentionally, intentional action may be required to stir bystanders from their moral indifference. Those who aim to stir bystanders from their indifference should be familiar with the formative conditions that give rise to bystanders. In a list of formative conditions for the creation of bystanders one finds the following four conditions: (1) the valuing of insulation of group security; (2) compartmentalized thinking; (3) self-protective dissociation; (4) and the willful surrender of autonomy.21 The moving of bystanders to abandon indifference and raise the cry of genocide serves the interests of both rescuers and intended victims. However, the latter two conditions that create bystanders—self-protective disassociation and surrender of autonomy—suggest the bystanders are entrenched in a social network that may be prepared to condone genocide. What is of special interest to rescuers and moral theorists is the surrender of autonomy of bystanders. The surrender of autonomy of bystanders can begin by willfully accepting the propaganda that some perpetrators may offer to the public. That propaganda sells bystanders the values of perpetrators like the value of denigrating victims. Perpetrators of genocide act upon the assumption that their plan of action will meet with no resistance from bystanders, and through their inaction, bystanders confirm this assumption. The cry of genocide may allow bystanders to break away from the constraints of their social network and reclaim a sense of autonomy needed to withstand their domination by the perpetrators. An objector may also argue that the cry of genocide is incapable of addressing the harm of genocide. The objector’s too-little-and-too-late objection to the cry of genocide is and is not sound. The risk that the cry may come too late to prevent the killing of some members of the ethnic group targeted for elimination is undeniable. The cry of genocide supposes that full-blown genocide is impending or in progress. If the cry is raised before the complete annihilation or destruction of the targeted ethnic group, then it is neither too little nor too late to rescue those not yet killed. Alexander Hinton suggests that genocidal priming is an identifiable phase that precedes full-blown genocide.22 The cry of genocide can intervene to slow or halt the processes such as genocidal priming that precede full-blown genocide. It would be most effective if preemptive measures could forestall killing while genocidal priming is occurring. In the absence of those preemptive measures, the cry of genocide may halt the killing before the extermination of an entire ethnic group has occurred.

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Conclusion At first glance the act of raising a cry of genocide may seem altogether inadequate to confront the problem. The outcry is not a magic pill. However, the value of the cry of genocide should not be underestimated. The cry aims to identify as genocidal a set of acts that are intended to destroy either the lives or the culture of an ethnic group if not both. Raising the cry is a judgment on harmful acts and an intervening strike against genocide. While raising the cry of genocide can positively affect the lives of intended victims, it can also positively affect the lives of bystanders and even reluctant perpetrators. For bystanders the cry provides a way to condemn what is happening and to alleviate indifference. The cry can enable some individuals who would be bystanders to emerge from a blameworthy indifference to the suffering of others. For reluctant perpetrators it provides a reason to resist as well as a means of resistance. Raising the cry of genocide is valuable for the prevention or the cessation of genocidal acts. Moral agents interested in preserving life and culture should raise the cry of genocide for all the good it will do.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter authored by me appeared as the chapter, “Cry ‘Genocide!’ for  all the  good it will do.” in  the  volume: “Civility, Nonviolent Resistance, and the New Struggle for Social Justice.” (Netherlands: Brill: 2019). ISBN: 978-90-04-41757-1. 2. See https://www.genocidewatch.com/. 3. h t t p s : / / w w w. w h i t e h o u s e . g o v / b r i e f i n g -­r o o m / s t a t e m e n t s -­ releases/2021/04/24/statement-­by-­president-­joe-­biden-­on-­armenian-­ remembrance-­day/ 4. John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 280. 5. Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide (New York: Lexington Books, 2012), 3. 6. Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the struggle for the Genocide Convention, 86. 7. Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the struggle for the Genocide Convention, 91. 8. Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2002),184.

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9. On the right to defend (R2D) and other methods of prevention see Scott Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016). 10. John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen (West Port, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001), 94. 11. Stephen K. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),153. 12. Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, 79. 13. Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, 78. 14. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 91. 15. Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, 105. 16. Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, 61. 17. Victoria Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999),11. 18. David I. Kertzer, The pope at war: the secret history of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022), 371. 19. Lewy, Perpetrators,105. 20. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide, 31. 21. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide, 156. 22. Alexander L.  Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 34.

CHAPTER 13

Postscript

Still fresh in the minds of US citizens is the siege upon the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. On that date President Trump said, “Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: we will stop the steal.” For whom was the president speaking when he said, “we will not take it anymore”? Perhaps he did not intend to create a fight, but the former president’s speech included the word fight or fighting twenty times.1 A sufficient number in the crowd that day were primed to seize upon the word “fight.” Those who were compelled to fight that day stormed the Capitol. The Washington Post estimated one hundred forty officers were injured during the event. I surmise hatred was in the minds of many who acted violently that day. Hate was the glue that rallied members of special interest groups like Proud Boys on January 6, hate pushed aside steel barricades and breeched the limits of a peaceful assembly, and hate was the driving force that led to the murder of Washington DC Officer Brian D. Sicknick. As a result of injuries sustained during the siege Sicknick died on January 7. On the one hand, the killing of Officer Sicknick can be seen as death in the line of duty. If so, then he was killed defending the Capitol and country against enemies within. On the other hand, some may wish to write off the killing of Officer Sicknick as collateral damage, since he fell under the

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violence of an enraged crowd. Whether he was thought to be battling an internal enemy of the state or battling an enraged crowd, he was the victim of a hate crime. This demonstration of hatred that seethes within our society is a reminder of how closely we all live to the forces that give rise to genocide. In the preceding twelve chapters we have examined ethical decision making in the Holocaust. To do so we have made continuous reference to genocide as a process. In the Holocaust, under the cloak of state sovereignty, politicians, soldiers, and civilians acting as perpetrators engaged in the mass murder of victims. They were primed for unremittent violence through propaganda, and they were licensed to kill by a system that deprived victims of their rights to property, freedom of movement, and life. Victims who were not immediately killed in this genocide were often forced into undignified and inhumane living circumstances where their ability to act morally was diminished. The agenda of the perpetrators determined the choices individuals like subordinate soliders would make and those that victims would be forced to confront. The oppressors would also force victims into moral gray zones where victims’ choices would be constrained. Those who chose to act as rescuers aimed to remain true to higher principles. Bystanders were not inanimate objects on the scene of the conflict. They were intentional actors who were caught in the drama. Bystanders had to choose how often and to what degree they would be complicit if they did not resist. Collectives like corporations, churches, and nations acted as bystanders. Rarely could a bystander claim as their moral excuse their genuine ignorance of the genocidal violence happening in their presence. In Chap. 12 both Martin Heidegger and Pope Pius XII were named as bystanders in their generation who chose not to raise the cry of genocide. We who are neither perpetrators nor victims in our generation must determine how we will react in the face of genocidal forces. When we look at the historical accounts of ethical decision making in the Holocaust, we see numerous and significant lessons in morality. We see how unchallenged decisions of high-ranking leaders and common citizens contributed to the stages of the Holocaust like classification, discrimination, and dehumanization. We also see the omissions of appropriate steps by other members of society to halt the progress to genocide. Good people who were bystanders allowed discrimination and dehumanization to happen through moral indifference or moral insensitivity. A few soldiers had the moral courage to refuse to participate in killing, while others in

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their units lacked the moral courage to follow the lead of dissenters and to refuse to kill. The preceding chapters end by examining the peak phase of genocide when mass murder is happening. Denial was discussed as a tactic to further the ends of the perpetrators.2 Some critics have argued that genocidal intent was lacking in the Holocaust. In his book On the Nature of Genocidal Intent, Jason Campbell offers a carefully reasoned argument to defend the notion that the Holocaust was driven by genocidal intent. I agree. Consider one of the five foundational claims identified by Campbell: “The extermination of targeted group members is justified because they threaten the existence of members of the protected population.”3 In the Holocaust the Nazis were overzealous in protecting the purity of the Aryan race. Implicit in that protectionist mentality is an insecurity. They saw victims as a threat to their supposed racial purity and their way of life. When Hitler used stereotypes to describe Jewish males as potential rapists lurking in shadows to overpower young German females, he was suggesting that they were a threat to the purity of the race. Nazis intended to eliminate all threats to their racial and ideological purity. The germ of that intent was present in the racism that they embraced and defended. When that intent went unchecked, it grew stronger and stronger as hatred that was unrestrained until it culminated in mass murder. Was there genocidal intent in the Holocaust? Yes. This volume focuses on the ethical decisions through the Holocaust. While I recognize the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, I also understand that genocide is an ongoing threat to the welfare of humanity. In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, the historian Omar Bartov says, “ultimately, the world we live in is the same that produced (and keeps producing) genocide.” 4 Why are we repeating today these historic accounts of ethical decision making? The Genocide Watch global map highlights several hotspots today where they believe genocide could erupt. The threat of genocide is a real and present threat. As Primo Levi points out, if it happened in the past, it could happen again. Those who care about the dignity of all humans and the upholding of universal rights cannot afford to let genocide continue to happen. The Holocaust confirms that genocide is a process that happens by stages. Within these stages it is evident that sound moral decision making has gone awry. If so, then we must tell and retell the story of ethics in the Holocaust to forestall bad ethical decision making and to prevent the process of genocide to continue unchecked in our time.

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Notes 1. Michael D.  Gambone, Modern Conspiracies in America: Separating Fact from Fiction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022), 164. 2. The author plans to include a discussion of hard-core denial in a separate study. 3. Jason Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 144. 4. Omar Bartov in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, et al. (New York: Harvard University Press, 2016), 321.

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Index1

A Ahnenerbe, 73 A. J. Topf, 191, 193, 199, 200 Ancestral protocol, 78, 86, 88 Antilocution, 63, 77 Antisemitism, 5, 81n18, 86, 94, 96, 104, 106, 115, 125, 128 Ardeatine Caves Massacre, 152 Auschwitz, 164, 165, 168, 169, 173, 208 B Barmen, 198 Barnett, Victoria, 221 Baum, Steven K., 218, 221, 224 Bystander, 52, 224, 230 C Card, Claudia, 7, 13n13 Complicity, 188, 197, 202, 204, 208 Crematorium, 185, 201

D Dachau, 197 Dehumanization, 51, 213 Denial, 13, 15n22 Dignity, 137, 171n2, 200 E Egoism, 179 Eichmann, Adolf, 13n13, 185 Ethical parity, 31, 33n35 F Final Solution, 12, 164, 171n5 Flew, Anthony, 22 Frankl, Victor, 169, 181 Fundamental rights, 40, 52 G Genocidal priming, 12, 63, 65

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. E. Wilson, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9

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INDEX

Ghetto, 51, 97 Goebbels, Joseph, 68, 98, 107 Grey zone, 173, 174, 186 H Hate, 7, 13n11, 207, 230 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 116 Heidenrich, John G., 218 Heschel, Suzzanna, 108 Himmler, Heinrich, 72, 148 Hinton, Alexander L., 84, 225 Hitler, Adolph, 65, 231 Hobbes, Thomas, 40, 41 Hockenos, Matthew D., 198, 206 I IBM, 127 Intent, 22, 62, 231 J Jim Crow, 44 K Kant, Immanuel, 44, 162 Kapos, 149, 165 Kittle, Gerhard, 67, 109 Kreisau Circle, 146 Kressel, Neil J., 7, 28 Kristallnacht, 47, 96 L Lemkin, Raphael, 123, 216 Levi, Primo, 4, 161 Levinas, Emmanuel, 6 Lewy, Guenter, 219 Locke, John, 41 Luther, Martin, 19

M May, Larry, 124 Mellema, Gregory, 195 Milgram, Stanley, 13n13 Moral luck, 85, 100n6 Moral outrage, 129 Muselmänner, 161 N Natural law theory, 39 Niemöller, Martin, 196–198 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 5 Nonviolence, 144 Normative ethics, 9 P Partisans, 157 Phenotype, 127 Plato, 59 Pogrom, 205 Pope Paul VI, 19, 31n8 Pope Pius XII, 205, 212n12 Propaganda, 57, 104 R R2D, 130 Racism, 17 Realpolitik, 96 Resistance, 139 Resister, 134 Right to life, 9 Roman Catholic, 204 S Sonderkommando, 179 Stanton, Gregory H., 11, 37 Streicher, Julius, 71 Suicide, 168 Supersessionism, 18

 INDEX 

T T-4, 88 Tec, Nechama, 157 Terrorism, 124 Thoreau, Henry David, 35 U Ulmas, 142 US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 128

V Virtue, 162

W White Rose, 143

Z Zyklon B, 92

245