Holocaust

The Historical Markers of the Holocaust

No mass killing has stimulated more historical, theological, or philosophical reflection than the systematic destruction of almost 6 million European Jews. One result of this attention is that it has become the only such massacre to receive its own name. Even thinkers who are ideologically against construing the Holocaust as unique are now constrained by language to designate it so every time they use the term. This inherent uniqueness is a large part of why social theory, concerned as it is with universal and generalizable propositions, has largely shied away from the subject. On the other hand, the Holocaust has over the last three decades gradually come to be understood as an epoch-making event that plays a defining role in the self-understanding of the Western world. As such, it casts a wide shadow on social theory. The Holocaust gained this symbolic stature not only from the staggering number of people killed but because of the clarity of its genocidal intentions and its unprecedented use of modern industrial means of mass extermination.

The Holocaust thus put modernity, the primary analytic and normative framework for social theory, into question. The way in which it shed light on basic questions of morality, reason, and humanity made it into a paradigmatic test case for the relation of modernity and social theory. For thinkers who take this view (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944; Arendt 1963; Bauman 1989), the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis must be considered not solely as a German-Jewish tragedy but as a tragedy of modernity itself. In this regard, social theory can help explain the Holocaust and how the Holocaust has called into question several of the core theoretical concepts of social theory.

The term Holocaust is somewhat of a misnomer. It originates from the Greek term holokauston, which means burnt whole, implying a religious sacrifice. Given that the Nazi mass murder was not a sacrifice, but rather motivated by an anti-Semitic ideology whose main objective was the physical elimination of European Jewry, many prefer to refer to it as a genocide or by the Hebrew word Shoah. Nevertheless, Holocaust has remained the central term in the English-speaking world, whence it has spread to other parts of the world, and it is now the most widely used term for the mass murder of Jews in Europe. Nazi Germany also targeted other minorities such as Gypsies and homosexuals, as well as political opponents and large segments of the Slavic population it had subjugated in the course of its military expansion during World War II. But its main focus and most systematic efforts were reserved for the attempt to render Europe Judenrein (free of Jews). Approximately 6 million European Jews, out of an initial population of 10 million, perished in the Holocaust.

Amidst Germany's expansionist policies during World War II, the extermination of the Jews was conducted in parallel with a total war of destruction in Eastern Europe. Fully aware that such an endeavor would put strains on Germany's war effort and its resources, the Nazis were eager to find ways to kill such large numbers of people in more efficient ways. Toward that end they employed mobile death squads and specially designed gas chambers in death camps such as Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. Such camps have become the symbol for the barbarism of the Nazis. Inmates of those camps endured unimaginable sufferings (such as starvation, beatings, [Page 379]torture, and medical experiments) before they were led into the gas chambers. After the gas killed them, they were burned in nearby furnaces. Prior to being cremated, the Nazis made sure to strip the dead of their last possessions, removing gold teeth from the corpses. The cruelty and obsession with which the Nazis persecuted the Jews is evidenced in the way they heightened their efforts to kill as many as possible when it became evident that Germany was losing the war. Shipping Jews eastward to the camps remained a priority even when these very same trains were needed for critical military purposes. Given the logistical efforts involved in the systematic murder of millions of Jews, the Nazis frequently had to rely on help from the regular German army as well as from willing collaborators from the countries they occupied. Despite the scope of this bureaucratic-industrialized execution, the murder of the Jews did not lead to any significant attempt to halt the death factories. The primacy of killing and destruction has caused many observers to evoke the image of hell, a concept beyond the analytical tools of social theorists.

...