The Dynamics of Genocide: Germany 1938, America 2018

The Dynamics of Genocide: Germany 1938, America 2018

History is tragically replete with cases of genocide. Genocide means the killing of a people, of a specific, identified ethnic, social, religious, or other large group of people. The best known case of genocide in world history is the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The traditional number given for the number of Jews the Nazis killed is six million. Hitler didn’t quite exterminate European Jewry like he wanted to do, but he came close. The large, thriving Jewish cultures of Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, France, and other parts of Europe that the Nazis occupied were reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves. We’ve all seen the pictures. Many of us have heard Holocaust survivors speak of their experiences at the hands of the SS, the particularly vicious military unit Hitler used to do the dirtiest of his dirty work. Let me tell you of my earliest experiences of the Holocaust as a way of illustrating how genocide happens.

In the academic year 1957-1958 I lived in Berlin, Germany. My father, a historian and professor of history at the University of Oregon, was doing historical research in Berlin that year under a Fulbright fellowship. I was eleven years old. My twin brother and I attended sixth grade at the American Army School on a US military base in West Berlin. My parents, my maternal grandmother, my brother, and I occupied the front rooms of a large apartment on Innsbrücker Strasse in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The apartment belonged to an older German woman named Annamarie von Göldel. She and a man named Fredericus von Isenberg whom she identified as her brother-in-law lived in the rooms toward the back of the large apartment. Annamarie spoke reasonably good English. She was a widow. I don’t know the circumstances of her husband’s death. I understand that he was a physician and may have been the physician on a German expedition to Antarctica sometime in the 1930s. He was a Nazi. A card carrying, uniform wearing member of the National Socialist Party, the party headed by Adolf Hitler. I learned about the Holocaust that year in Berlin, living in what had been the belly of the beast. At the Army school I saw the horrible pictures of gas chambers, ovens, barracks, walking skeletons, and piles upon piles of emaciated dead bodies. I was young of course, only eleven years old, but I was old enough to have some appreciation of the horror of it all, horror perpetrated by the very people among whom I was living at the time. I had two personal experiences with Annamarie that say a lot, I think, about how otherwise decent people can be led to commit genocide.

In the first of those experiences, one day I was playing with a German wind up toy car on the floor of the large entryway of the apartment off of which several rooms and a hallway to the back of the apartment opened. Annamarie saw me playing there. She said “This will be fun,” and she went to the large armoire that stood in that entryway. She opened it and took out her husband’s old Nazi Party uniform. It wasn’t a stage prop. It wasn’t a costume created for a World War II movie. It was the real thing, the uniform worn by a man who had been a member of Hitler’s political party. She took the armband off it. You’ve all seen those armbands in movies, a red armband with a white circle on it and inside the white circle a black swastika a “Hakenkreuz,” as the Germans called it. She brought the armband over to me and tried to put it on me. I was a meek, mousy, insecure eleven year old, but I refused to let her put that hateful thing on me. I had learned what it meant. I knew how evil it was. Annamarie didn’t. It was a thing from her past, and she thought it would make a fun toy for this young American boy playing in her vestibule. My refusal to let her put that hideous thing on my arm remains one of the proudest moments of my life to this day.

In the second of those experiences Annamarie was talking to my parents, and I was present. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but I’ll never forget what Annamarie said. She said: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.” Notice: “What happened to the Jews” not “what we did to the Jews.” The German of that sentence would be “Was der Juden passiert ist, not “Was wir der Juden getan haben.” Passive constructions like that, I think in German as well as in English, avoid taking responsibility for one’s actions. We didn’t do it, it happened. Notice too how Annamarie had bought Hitler’s lies about the Jews: “Something had to be done.” She had bought the lie that the Jews were so evil and so destructive that while it might be “too bad” that they all had to be killed, still they all had to be killed.

That is how genocide happens. People in a position of power buy a lie about a vulnerable population. They buy the lie that the people of that vulnerable population are responsible for all of the problems the people of power are experiencing. In the 1920s and 1930s the Germans were truly experiencing a lot of very severe problems. They had lost World War I, which was bad enough for them, but then the victorious allies imposed the Treaty of Versailles on them. It blamed Germany for the war, when in fact the war was a consequence of tensions and treaties between all the European imperial powers not solely the fault of Germany. It stripped Germany of large blocks of land on its western, northern, and eastern borders. It imposed crippling sanctions on Germany. It was a major factor in creating the out of control inflation that crippled the German economy in the 1920s. The Treaty of Versailles is one of the most unwise treaties imposed by victors on a defeated power in world history and bears at least some of the responsibility for World War II. It crippled Germany economically and militarily. It made the German people angrier at the western allies than they had been before. It created massive social, economic, and psychological problems for the Germans.

Enter Adolf Hitler. Surely, he said, all of Germany’s problems can’t be the Germans’ fault. No, he said, it was the fault of Jewish bankers and other Jews supposedly holding great power over the Germans who were exploiting Germany to make themselves rich. Germany’s problems were, he said, the fault of a small but not insignificant group of non-Germans who hated Germany, hated Christianity, and were out to destroy them for their own gain. Hitler’s lies about the Jews were supported by and fed into a long history of Christian anti-Judaism. The Nazis and other anti-Jewish voices called the Jews “Christ killers,” never mind that Christ had been killed 1,900 years earlier with the Jews of the 1930s having of course had nothing to do with it and that he had been killed by the Romans not the Jews. The hatred that leads to genocide is never grounded in truth but in lies.

In 1933 the German people put the Nazi party in power, and Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor. His rhetoric was virulently anti-Jewish, but he didn’t immediately create the death camps or engage in violence against the Jews. He started by identifying the victim minority by making them wear yellow stars. The Nazis had been urging Germans not to do business with Jews for years. Now in power they enacted various anti-Jewish laws. Jews were excluded from certain professions. Jewish professionals were dismissed from their posts. The anti-Jewish mania of the Nazis and the German population as a whole got ramped up until on November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazis perpetrated the outrage known at Kristallnacht, a German word that literally means “crystal night” but that usually gets translated as “The Night of Broken Glass.” It was a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in which synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses attacked, and around 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht marked the beginning of Nazi violence against the Jews. That violence eventually produced Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and numerous other concentration camps in which most of those six million Jews the Nazis murdered were killed.

And the German people at least let it happen, and a great many of them participated in the slaughter. Why? Because they believed the lies. Because European Christianity in general and Nazi propaganda in particular had so demonized the Jews that people were willing to believe that they weren’t killing human beings, they were killing demonic animals. There’s a musical number in the show Cabaret that shows how it happened. In the cabaret the master of ceremonies, brilliantly played on Broadway and in the film by Joel Grey, is on stage dancing with someone in a gorilla suit. He sings of the gorilla as his girlfriend and that if people would only see her through his eyes they would understand their relationship and leave them alone. His last line, delivered with a devilish grin, is: “If they could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” Genocide always involves dehumanization. The German people bought the dehumanization of the Jews because while what happened to the Jews was too bad, “after all, something did have to be done.”

Donald Trump is treating Mexicans and other Spanish speaking people from Central and South America who cross the Mexican-American border in the same that way Hitler and the Nazis treated the Jews. He calls them all murderers and rapists, never mind that they are no more murderers and rapists than any other human population is. He pretends that these people, these human beings doing nothing but seeking safety and a better life for themselves and their children, are a huge threat to the American way of life. He ignores facts like the American agricultural industry could hardly function without them. He presents them as a foreign, non-white mass of people so evil that they are hardly human at all. And now he’s tearing infants, toddlers, and children (including children with disabilities) away from their parents and putting them behind chain-link fences to sleep on concrete floors. He’s denying them adequate medical care. He’s even deporting their parents without reuniting the parents with their children. He tells lies about these people, and he tells lies about who is responsible for what he is doing. He blames the law, but the law doesn’t require him to do what he’s doing. He blames the Democrats, but his Republican party controls both houses of Congress and the White House. He is committing an outrage at least as bad as the incarceration of Japanese-Americans on the west coast at the beginning of World War II. It’s not as bad as what we Euro-Americans did do the Native Americans whose land we stole, but it’s bad. Really bad. Unconscionably bad.

And so I ask: Is the forced taking of immigrant children from their parents our Kristallnacht? Is it the beginning of more ruthless and even violent actions against a victim population identified as the cause of problems it has nothing to do with causing? I pray that it is not, but Trump’s actions fit the pattern of genocide perfectly. It hasn’t reached the stage of death camps yet. It hasn’t reached the stage of Wounded Knee yet, but it is on the road to those atrocities. Will we buy the Trump’s lies about Spanish-speaking, darker-skinned immigrants from the south the way the Germans bought Hitler’s lies about the Jews? I pray that we won’t, but millions of Americans already have. Genocide has a well-known dynamic, and it is at play in Trump’s policies toward people at the Mexican border. Will enough of us wake up enough to stop it? I pray that we will. I fear that we won’t.