Every day large coaches came to the ghetto; they take the soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild animals. Often soldiers strike out at passers by with long whips as they drive through. They go to the cemetery where they take pictures. They compel the families of the dead and the rabbis to interrupt the funeral and to pose in front of their lenses. They set up genre pictures (old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).16
At the time of Goebbels’s visit, the future was bleak for the Jews of Lodz. They had been harassed and abused, their businesses closed, their property confiscated, and the four great synagogues of the city had been burned to the ground. Before long, most would perish in extermination camps or die of starvation. But all that Goebbels could see were vermin: carriers of the Jewish disease—a disease that would engulf the world unless it was obliterated. In the film’s most notorious scenes, a swarm of rats appears on the screen, followed by scenes of rats emerging from sewers and infesting bags of grain, and then by shots of street life in Lodz, while the narrator explains:
Wherever rats appear they bring ruin, by destroying mankind’s goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious and underground destruction, just like the Jews among human beings.17
The Eternal Jew emphasizes the connection between Jews and filth, decay, and disease in every sector of cultural life. For instance, the narrator gravely states that this “race of parasites” has no feeling for the “purity and cleanliness” of the German idea of art. A “smell of foulness and disease” pervades Jewish art, which is “unnatural, grotesque, perverted, or pathological.” However, the heroic National Socialist movement was determined to extirpate the pestilence. There were around 230,000 Jewish residents of Lodz when German troops marched into the city in September 1939. Six years later, when the Russians liberated it, fewer than nine hundred were left alive.
Although it may seem to be an oxymoron, the architects of the Final Solution conceived of their task primarily as a moral one. They seamlessly elided images of physical filth and disease with concepts of moral impurity. The Jews embodied evil, just as German civilization embodied moral purity. The Nazis’ worldview combined elements of both physical and moral danger in a package not unlike contemporary Americans’ image of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban (Hitler often remarked that Jews “are very radical and have terroristic inclinations”).18 This apocalyptic vision is well summarized by Jay Gonen in his book on The Roots of Nazi Psychology. Gonen writes that the Nazis believed that “we live in a polarized and most dangerous world in which nothing is safe.…”
A pervasive danger floated over the polarized world.… Everything now seemed exposed to an insidious and corrupting agent of sickness. Life is dominated by the need to protect against the killing disease.… Hitler’s perception was clear and ominous. An ill-understood evil is on the verge of triumph in this world. Nevertheless it can still be successfully fought. Total education could produce understanding of the disease while only total fanaticism could sustain the all-out combat necessary to stem its course and even to eradicate it once and for all.19
The stakes couldn’t be higher. The fate of the world rested on the shoulders of those men and women with the sagacity to appreciate the Führer’s message, and the courage to embrace their duty to humanity. There is no more revealing example of this peculiar moral sensibility than Nazi security chief Heinrich Himmler’s speech to the SS officers in the Polish town of Poznan on October 4, 1943.
I am referring to … the extermination of the Jewish people.… Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have stayed decent, that has made us hard.…
He goes on to insist that all the wealth confiscated from murdered Jews was turned over to the Reich, and that SS did not keep any booty for themselves (“not … so much as a fur, as a watch … one mark or a cigarette”). Stealing confiscated goods is immoral, and those few who yielded to temptation would be executed.
We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people to destroy this people.… We do not want, in the end, because we have destroyed a bacillus, to be infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.20
This theme is repeated in the letters and memoirs of patriotic Germans of the period, and not just the top brass. They took themselves to be mounting a defense of humanity against subhumanity, civilization against barbarism, virtue against moral degradation. One young serviceman wrote from the Eastern Front in 1941, where Russians were dying like flies and mobile killing units were slaughtering Jews en masse, that he was motivated by “the struggle for the truly human … the timeless cause of the spirit.” Another wrote home that the war is all about “the preservation of human dignity, which is purified by pain and renunciation … the battle with the ghostly manifestations of Materialism.” A company commander told his men that they were fighting to “revive the ancient virtues buried under layers of filth.” Propaganda leaflets handed out to the troops assured them that “We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity … the rebellion of the subhumans against noble blood.”21
It may seem barely comprehensible that intelligent men and women could view the world in such a hideously distorted way, and, turning their Manichean vision into policy, wage a genocidal war against a harmless people. It requires little effort to condemn the Nazis. Moral outrage comes cheaply. It is more difficult, and surely more valuable, to address those features of the human condition that precipitated the tragedy.
GENOCIDE
… Paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.
—ROY CAMPBELL, “AUTUMN”22
Many—perhaps most—researchers into genocide agree that efforts to destroy an entire people are almost always accompanied by the idea that those being annihilated aren’t really people. As Daniel Goldhagen notes, “[T]he term dehumanization is rightly a commonplace of discussions of mass murder. It is used as a master category that describes the attitudes of killers, would-be killers, and larger groups towards actual and intended victims.”23
Gregory H. Stanton, founder and president of the human rights organization Genocide Watch, describes dehumanization as a regular feature of genocides. “One group,” he writes, “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. At this stage, hate propaganda … is used to vilify the victim group.” Likewise, University of Nebraska psychologist David Moshman notes that members of the victimized group “are construed as elements of a subhuman, nonhuman, or antihuman collective.” Psychologist Clark McCauley and sociologist Daniel Chirot make a similar observation: “In most genocidal events the perpetrators devalue the humanity of their victims, often by referring to the victims as animals, diseased, or exceptionally filthy … notably pigs, rats, maggots, cockroaches, and other vermin” (or with “monstrous” creatures).24
With these observations in mind, let’s briefly survey the role that dehumanization has played in some of the worst episodes of genocidal slaughter of the last hundred years.
When, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European powers were carving up the “dark continent” of Africa, they treated the indigenous people as beasts of burden, and
sometimes as dangerous animals. “The blacks give an immense amount of trouble…,” complained explorer Henry Morton Stanley, an agent of the Belgian King Leopold II. “When mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily-inclined, a dog-whip became their backs, restoring them to a sound—sometimes to an extravagant—activity.”25
While the Belgians were helping themselves to the rich natural resources of the Congo, German colonists were busy plundering what is now the nation of Namibia, where they committed the first full-blown genocide of the twentieth century. The German and Dutch colonists regarded the indigenous Nama and Herero people with contempt, an attitude that they made no effort to conceal. A petition sent to the Colonial Department in Berlin by white farmers in the region stated, with alarming explicitness, that it is “impossible to regard them as human beings.”26 A contemporary missionary report confirmed that:
[T]he average German looks upon and treats the natives as creatures being approximately on the same level as baboons (their favorite word to describe the natives).… Consequently the whites value their horses and oxen more highly than they do the natives. Such a mentality breeds harshness, deceit, exploitation, injustice, rape, and, not infrequently, murder as well.27
The abuses ignited a rebellion, which was brutally suppressed by General Lothar von Trotha, with the help of 14,000 troops imported for this purpose from the Fatherland. Von Trotha tailored his military strategy to the perceived status of the rebels. “Against nonhumans,” he wrote, “one cannot conduct war humanely.” Many were shot outright. Others were driven into the Kalahari Desert, where soldiers had poisoned the water holes. “Like a wounded beast the enemy was tracked down from one water hole to the next,” states an official military report, “until finally he became the victim of his own environment.” Some were burned alive. One eyewitness to the incineration of twenty-five men, women, and children reported, “The Germans said ‘We should burn all these dogs and baboons in this fashion.’” Survivors were imprisoned in concentration camps. Around 60,000 Herero (around 75 percent of the original population), 10,000 Nama (half of the original population), and up to 250,000 others, men, women, and children, perished.28
Ten years later, genocide erupted in Turkey. Even before the bloodbath of 1915–16, Muslim Turks periodically butchered members of Christian minorities (primarily Armenians, but also Greeks and Assyrians) who were forced to endure the degrading status of dhimmitude. “The Turkish rule,” wrote British ethnographer William M. Ramsey, “meant unutterable contempt.…”
The Armenians (and the Greek) were dogs and pigs … to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family was sacred or safe from violence—capricious, unprovoked violence—to resist which by violence meant death!29
The spirit of these pogroms, as well as their scope, is evident from the text of a letter sent by a Turkish officer to his parents and brother, and intercepted by British agents in 1895. “My brother,” it begins, “if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs.…” Between 1894 and 1896, as many as 100,000 Armenians were killed in clashes with government forces and Muslim militias. In the decade to follow, resurgent Turkish nationalism put further pressure on non-Muslim minorities. Threatening letters were sent to the Armenian press, one of which promised to “clean up the Armenian infidels who have become tubercular microbes for us.”30
This promise was fulfilled in the spring of 1915. Plans for the genocide were finalized at a secret government meeting, where officials discussed a ten-point strategy, which included the decision to arrest and kill any Armenians who had ever worked against the government, to close all Armenian societies, and to stir up anti-Armenian feeling among Muslims to provoke organized massacres. Soon all Armenian men in the Turkish army were disarmed and massacred, and thousands of criminals were released from prison to form mobile killing units. The victims were either killed outright or forced to join a death march into the Syrian Desert, without food, water, or protection from the elements. The roads were littered with emaciated corpses. Most died of hunger, or were killed, along the way, and the remainder were exterminated after having reached their destination. As is usually the case in genocide, the rape of women and young girls was commonplace.
The Turkish authorities didn’t characterize their victims as wild animals. They conceived of them in much the same way as the Nazis would later imagine Jews—as disease organisms infecting the body of the state—and announced the need to “rid ourselves of these Armenian parasites.” Mehmed Resid, a professor of legal medicine at Istanbul Medical School and a major player in the genocide, described Armenians as “dangerous microbes” and asked, with grim rhetorical force, “Isn’t it the duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?” Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities were also identified with traditionally unclean animals such as rats, dogs, and pigs. As many as a million and a half men, women, and children were wiped out, usually by starvation, stabbing, clubbing, or asphyxiation, and also by burning and drowning. They were rarely shot, as bullets were deemed to be too valuable to waste on subhuman creatures.31
For most readers of this book, the word genocide is probably synonymous with Auschwitz. The Holocaust was the paradigmatic twentieth-century genocide, and is also the most thoroughly documented one. There is an immense literature describing how Germans of the Third Reich thought of Jews, as well as Slavs and Gypsies, as less than human, portraying them as apes, pigs, rats, worms, bacilli, and other nonhuman creatures. And it is abundantly clear from this evidence that the Nazis did not intend the term subhuman to be taken metaphorically. “One does not hunt rats with a revolver,” quipped one SS expert, in a chilling allusion to the mass exterminations, “but with poison and gas.”32
Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the centrality of dehumanization for the Nazi project is to look at its role in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s 1925 autobiography-cum-ideological screed. After closely examining the patterns of figurative language in Mein Kampf, German scholar Andreas Musolff has concluded:
The source imagery of Hitler’s political worldview consisted in the conceptualization of the German (but, in principle, every) nation as a human body that had to be shielded from disease (or, in case of an outbreak, cured). Jewish people, who were conceptually condensed into the super-category of “the Jew” and viewed as an illness-spreading parasite, represented the danger of disease. Deliverance from this threat to the nation’s life would come from Hitler and his party as the only competent healers who were willing to fight the illness.33
Hitler repeatedly calls “the Jew” a germ, germ carrier, or agent of disease, a decomposing agent, fungus, or maggot. In their capacity as germ-carriers, Jews are equated with vermin or, more specifically, rats and the source of an epidemic or pestilence comparable to syphilis. The Jewish disease is most often presented as a sort of blood-poisoning. “In the most basic version,” Musolff observes, “Hitler likens the Jew to a viper or adder … whose bite directly introduces venom into the bloodstream of the victim.” In their capacity as blood poisoners, Hitler also refers to Jews as bloodsuckers, leeches, and poisonous parasites (Hitler and Goebbels also characterized Jewry as a “ferment of decomposition,” which is a misappropriation of a phrase from the work of Nobel laureate Theodor Mommsen, who used it to refer to the positive contributions that Jews made to European civilization).34 Just like the nineteenth-century polygenecists, the National Socialists clung to the idea that human races are distinct species. Hitler introduces this theme in Mein Kampf with a juvenile homily about the birds and the bees. “Every animal mates only with a representative of the same species,” he remarks. “The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the common mouse t
he common mouse, the wolf the wolf, etc.”
Have you got wind of where this is heading? Hitler continues:
The consequence of this purity of race, generally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp delimitation of the races from others, but also their uniform character in themselves. A fox is always a fox, a goose a goose, a tiger a tiger, etc.35
The two races are irrevocably distinct, and their mixture is an affront to nature, leading to “a slowly but surely progressing sickness” and producing “monstrosities half-way between man and ape.” From a scientific perspective, this is gibberish. Races aren’t species, and descriptive biological laws, which cannot be violated, are nothing like prescriptive social regulations, which can. In conflating these categories, Hitler was trying to establish that Jews and Aryans are radically different kinds of beings, and to underwrite his genocidal policies not only by nature, but also by God, who created the laws of nature. Racial mixing, he claims, is a “sin against the will of the eternal Creator.”36
At the same time that the National Socialist project was gathering momentum, the Soviet state was visiting mass murder on its own citizens. The targets were so-called Kulaks (the word literally means “fists,” meant as an abbreviation for “tight-fisted”), relatively affluent independent farmers who had been identified by the Soviet regime as class enemies of the communist state. At least nine million were killed. The Soviet propaganda machine ground out political posters that presented them as creatures such as snakes, spiders, and vermin.37
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