Disproportionate
Deaths and How They Could Happen
I have a PhD in Russian history. I
have known Russian history better than by far most Americans for a very long
time. I have known for a very long time that the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics suffered more casualties in World War II than the United States did,
orders of magnitude more. I have had some personal exposure to that suffering. My
personal acquaintance with the suffering of the Russian people in World War II
began in the summer of 1968. I participated that summer in a Russian language
program of Indiana University. I and the other students in that program spent
five weeks in Bloomington, Indiana, on the beautiful campus of Indiana
University, studying Russian. Then we went, in three different groups, to the
Soviet Union. During the five weeks I spent in the USSR that summer I visited
Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called), Pyatigorsk (site of what was
then the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, now Pyatigorsk Foreign
Languages University), Tbilisi (the capital then of the Soviet Socialist
Republic of Georgia, now of the independent nation of Georgia), Kiev (the
capital then of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, now of the
independent nation of Ukraine), and Moscow (then the capital of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics and the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic,
now the capital of the independent nation of Russia). It was particularly in
Leningrad that I began to learn of the deaths and the suffering the people of
Russia sustained in what they call the Great Patriotic War ( `or the Great War of the Fatherland,
the Russian term will translate either way) and we call World War II.
A few things stand out in my memory
from my time in Leningrad that summer. One was a question Russian people asked
me more than once: “Are both of your parents still alive?” I was born in 1946,
just over one year after the end of World War II, but the Russians with whom I
spoke didn’t know that about me. They may well have assumed that I was born
during the war. They were all surprised when I answered their question yes. Few
of them, it seems, could have answered the same question the same way.
Then there was walking down Nevskii
Prospekt, the main street of downtown Leningrad. I would see war damage to the
buildings on one side of the street but not the other. Our Russian guide
explained that that was because the shells from the Germans came from one
direction such that they passed over the buildings on one side of the street
and hit the buildings on the other side. I learned that the Germans had
besieged Leningrad.
Then I began to learn about the
magnitude of the death and suffering the German siege caused in that great
city. Our guide took us to a memorial cemetery outside the city. It is the
final resting place of an enormous number of residents of Leningrad who died
during that siege. It’s size was simply overwhelming.
I learned much more about the siege
of Leningrad years later when I read the book Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,
The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized
by Shostakovich, by Brian Moynahan. I
learned that around one million residents of Leningrad, roughly one third of
the city’s population, died during that siege. Most of the them starved to
death. Parents watched their children starve to death. Children watched their
parents starve to death. Shostakovich managed somehow to premier his Seventh
Symphony, called the Leningrad Symphony, during the siege, but most of the
musicians who performed it were starving to death. Through it all, Stalin’s NKVD,
a predecessor of the KGB, kept on arresting, torturing, and killing citizens of the city as they had been doing
for years before the war began. Moynahan tells one story of a man whose daily
eight hour shift consisted of shooting people in the back of the head. The
suffering in Leningrad during the siege is essentially incomprehensible to those
of us who have never experienced anything like it.
Then, just now, I finished reading
the book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by the great Yale
historian Timothy Snyder.[1]
Snyder’s project in that book is to describe the intentional policies of mass
killing carried out between 1933 and 1945 by both Stalin and Hitler in the
lands of central and eastern Europe occupied in those years by both the
communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Much of that territory suffered three
occupations, first by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets
again.
The intentional killing of millions
of people in that unfortunate part of the world began in 1933 when Stalin
instituted a policy of mass starvation in the USSR but mostly in Ukraine. He
did it partly as an aspect of his effort to collectivize Soviet agriculture and
partly as a way to blame the failure of collectivized agriculture on
anti-Soviet peasants, especially Ukrainian peasants. Snyder says 3.4 million
Ukrainians died in that artificial, intentionally imposed famine.
Next came what Snyder calls the
Great Terror of 1937-1938. In the Great Terror Stalin intentionally killed
between 600,000 and 700,000 Soviet people. A disproportionate number of them
were Poles and Ukrainians. Stalin and his instruments of terror made up
something they called the Polish Military Organization. No such organization
ever existed, but Stalin’s NKVD sent to the Gulag or killed thousands upon
thousands of people accused of being part of it. Many but by no means all of
those people were either Polish or in some other way were accused of being
agents of a Polish plot to overthrow the USSR. Soviet Jews also suffered
disproportionately in the Great Terror though they were not specific targets of
it.
In 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed
the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression treaty. Hitler promptly invaded Poland
from the west. Shortly thereafter, Stalin invaded Poland from the east. The two
totalitarian states had signed a secret protocol to the nonaggression pact that
divided Poland, and Baltic states, and part of Romania between them. What had
been the independent nation of Poland was quickly occupied by both the Germans
and the Soviets. Both of those nations engaged in intentional mass killings in
that region in the years 1939 to 1941, before Hitler invaded the USSR.
Snyder explains that Hitler did not
yet have a policy of murdering Europe’s Jews. He had what he called the Final
Solution to what he called the Jewish problem, but it did not at first involve
the industrialized genocide in which the Nazis later engaged. Rather, Hitler
planned at first to deport Europe’s Jews. The Nazis had four different possible
deportation plans. One of them involved shipping the Jews to Madagascar, which
was at the time a French possession. The British navy made that plan
impossible. Another involved moving all of Europe’s Jews into a conquered USSR
as far east as the Urals, then working and starving both them and a great many
Slavs to death. This plan would have resulted in tens of millions of
intentionally imposed deaths.
Nonetheless, as soon as the Nazis
occupied any part of Poland or the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet republics,
they began the intentional mass killing of Jews. They didn’t do it with gas
chambers. They did it with bullets. They forced either Soviet prisoners of war
or the Jews themselves to dig pits, then shot them either so that they fell
into the pits or were already prone in the pits. One particularly egregious instance
of this policy took place at a ravine outside of Kiev called Babi Yar. There,
on September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazis
and their local collaborators shot around 33,770 people, most of them Jews.
Similar mass killings of Jews and others took place throughout the lands that
had been Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, at this stage of Hitler’s plans mostly if not exclusively
with bullets not gas chambers.
Both the Germans and the Soviets
enacted similar policies of killing in the lands they occupied at the beginning
of the war. They both set out to eliminate Poland’s educated and professional
classes. They both feared that such people could lead resistance to their
occupation of their homeland, but they had different ideological justifications
for the killing. The Germans were engaged in ethnic cleansing. The Soviets were
killing supposed class enemies. Both of them killed thousands upon thousands of
people.
One famous incident of such killing
took place in the forest called Katyn in April and May, 1940. There the NKVD,
Stalin’s primary instrument of killing and terror, killed around 22,000 Polish
military and police officers and other members of the Polish intelligentsia. For
decades the Soviets blamed these killings of the Germans. More recently the
Russians have admitted that it was the Soviets who did it.
Hitler had always intended to
eliminate all Jews from Europe. At first he intended to do it through
deportation and by working and starving millions of them to death. He planned
to do that in what he expected to be a defeated and prostrate Soviet Union. The
victory Hitler expected to win in the Soviet Union in a matter of months after
he invaded in June, 1941, never came. Hitler could never implement that plan,
but he never gave up his goal of eliminating all Jews from Europe. When it
became clear that he was not going to win his war against the Soviets, which
happened not later than 1942, he had to change his tactics for accomplishing
that diabolical goal.
That’s when the gassing started. Hitler’s
first gas of death was carbon monoxide. His SS and other killers would pipe
exhaust from trucks or stand alone internal combustion engines into enclosed
spaced into which people, mostly Jews, had been forced. Only later, and mostly
if not exclusively at Auschwitz, did the Nazis use Zyklon B, the trade name of
the pesticide hydrogen cyanide.
Most of us Americans, I suspect,
associate Hitler’s gassing of countless numbers of Jews with the concentration
camp at Auschwitz. The Nazis did construct gas chambers and crematoria there,
but Auschwitz was not originally a death camp. It was a concentration camp.
Snyder points out that the two types of camp are not the same thing. The
concentration camps initially were sites of forced labor not of intentional
murdering. The intentional murdering with gas did not begin at Auschwitz. It
began in late 1941 at the Polish city of Chelmno and elsewhere. It was carried
out at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec before it was done at Auschwitz. Auschwitz
became the main Nazi death camp, but it did so relatively late. A relatively
small percentage of all the Jews the Nazis killed were killed at Auschwitz. Most
of them were Hungarians not Poles or members of other nationalities.
Snyder puts the number of people
intentionally killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945 at 14 million. He
says this number is probably conservative. He puts the number of Jews killed at
5.4 million, a number he also says is conservative. In his 14 million he
includes only those who were killed in areas occupied by both the Germans and
the Soviets at different times and only those killed as a result of an
intentional policy of killing by the occupying forces. It does not include
battlefield deaths or other deaths that happened but were not specifically part
of an intentional policy.
The number 14 million deaths is
essentially impossible to comprehend. It exceeds by 13 million the number of
British and American casualties in World War II taken together. It also exceeds
the number of battlefield losses in all of America’s foreign wars by 13
million.[2]
I do not mean to minimize the tragedy of American and British war deaths. They
are truly tragic, and the survivors of those killed did truly mourn their dead
loved ones. But they are a tiny fraction of the number of people the Nazis and
the Soviets intentionally killed in what Snyder calls the bloodlands between
1933 and 1945.
Snyder’s 14 million is far from the
total number of people killed in the USSR, lands occupied by the USSR, and
lands occupied by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. Many Americans think World
War II began on December 7, 1941. It didn’t. It began on September 1, 1939,
when Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. The Soviets invaded Poland from
the east shortly thereafter. The Nazis and especially the Soviets had already
intentionally killed millions of people by the time World War II was underway
in Europe.
Then it got worse. World War II was
horrific the whole world over, but what was its most horrific times of killing
began on June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded his former ally the Soviet Union. Accounts
diverge, but it appears that the Germans lost between 4 and 5 million killed on
the eastern front of the European war. Common figures for the number of Soviet
citizens killed in World War II range from around 20 million to around 24
million out of a population of around 194 million. Most but by no means all of
those deaths were of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians. When we add
Snyder’s 14 million intentional deaths to those numbers we find that between
1933 and 1945, something like 34 to 38 million people died. American deaths in
all of World War II, both military and civilian, totaled around 420,000. That is a horrific number, but it is
about 1.5% of the number of people killed in the bloodlands in Snyder’s
relevant years.
That’s why I have titled this piece
“Disproportionate Deaths and How They Could Happen.” The impact of World War II
on Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and other parts of Snyder’s bloodlands is
orders of magnitude greater than the impact of World War II on the United
States. I don’t mean to suggest that the impact of World War II on the United
States was minimal. It wasn’t. It brought the US out of the Great Depression
and made the country the major world power. But America’s enemies in World War
II invaded the Aleutian Islands and dropped one bomb on Oregon. Otherwise, the
war did not touch the 48 states that made up the union at that time. No one
destroyed New York the way the Germans destroyed Warsaw. Nobody shot 33,000
people into the Grand Canyon the way the Germans shot people into Babi Yar. No
one built death camps on US soil. D-Day had its significance for the outcome of
the war in Europe, but by then the Soviets had already lost millions of people
and had the Germans on the run; and their sustaining casualties was far from
over.
There can be no doubt that World
War II inflicted massive economic damage on the USSR. It would inevitably take
the country years to recover from that damage. Yes, for decades after the war the
Soviet leaders used the destruction from the war as an excuse for the
inadequacy of their economy, especially for the production of consumer goods.
But the cynicism of the Soviet leadership doesn’t change the truth about the
war and the amount of suffering it inflicted on the Soviets. That suffering
staggers the imagination. Those of us who have never experienced anything like
it can probably never truly understand it.
I once said to my history professor
father that it seems like in the first half of the twentieth century the whole
world went mad. It began with World War I, which I haven’t even mentioned here.
I have mentioned here some truly shocking figures on the number of deaths on
the German-Soviet front in World War II, but I haven’t mentioned the millions
of deaths that different nations incurred in the Asian theater of that war. China
and Japan suffered as badly as Russia and Germany did. The world saw tens of
millions of deaths in the short span of twelve years between 1933 and 1945. No
other brief period of human history has seen the madness of those twelve years.
And I have to ask: How was it
possible? How could human beings do to other human beings what so many human
beings did to other human beings in those few years? I have written on that
question before on this blog. I’ll repeat here what I said there, then add
another two factors, namely, the human proclivity for obeying even illegal
orders and the human compulsion to look out only for oneself.
The most significant thing that
leads human beings to commit atrocities against other human beings is
dehumanization. In virtually every war, and certainly in every modern war, each
of the combatants has dehumanized their opponent. The German Nazis give us
perhaps the best example of a people doing that to other people. Nazi ideology
was racial ideology, though they thought of race differently than we do. To
them, the Germans were the superior human race. They were superior to all other
races, that is, to all other humans. In particular, the Nazis considered all
Jews and all Slavs, along with a few others, to be truly subhuman. Not fully
human. Less than fully human. Certainly less than the Germans.
For most of the Germans who
committed mass murder against Jews and Poles, they were not committing murder
at all. Murder is one human being willfully killing another human being. It is
not a human being killing some being that is not fully human. To the Nazis,
Jewish people were not fully human. They were some sort of subhuman species
distinct from the superior Germans. Slavic people weren’t fully human to the
Nazis either. Hitler meant to eliminate all Jews from Europe either by
deporting them to Madagascar or elsewhere or by killing them all. He meant to
do essentially the same thing to all Slavic people, especially the Poles, the
Russians, and the Ukrainians. He had no trouble recruiting an enormous number
of people who were more than willing to carry out his dirty work. How as that
possible? Dehumanization, that’s how. For the Nazis, Jews and Slavs were
subhuman and therefore did not deserve to live if their death benefited the
superior humans, the Germans.
Secular ideology is another factor
in the dynamics that led so many people to kill so many other people between
1933 and 1945. I’ll look just at the Germans and Soviets in this regard, though
the same analysis applies to the Japanese imperialists and the Chinese
Communists. Nazi ideology was thoroughly secular. Perhaps it did not deny the
reality of God as explicitly as Marxism does, but it posited something other
than God as the people’s primary concern, as their highest value. That
something was the German people, and the concept “the German people” is purely
secular.
While some may speak of the spirit
of a particular people, the concept “the German people” is a abstraction, and
it is a secular one. The German people consists of German people, individual
human beings. There is nothing transcendent about them. There is nothing divine
about them. When you make them your ultimate concern the way the Nazis did, you
make an idol of them. You have something purely human function as something
truly divine. You make a god of that which is not God. In other words, you
create an idolatrous secular ideology.
The same is true of Marxism whether
in its pure form from Karl Marx or in its Marxist-Leninist form in the Soviet
Union. Marxism is aggressively atheistic in a way that Nazism didn’t need to
be. Marx was a philosophical materialist. That is, he believed in the reality
only of the material, the physical. He didn’t just deny the reality of God. He
considered belief in God to be nothing but a tool the capitalists used to
control the proletariat, the working people of a capitalist economy.
Nazism made an idol out of the
German people. Marxism and Marxism-Leninism made a idol out of the proletariat,
out of a country’s workers. In theory at least, the welfare of the proletariat
was a Marxist’s ultimate concern. Marxism subordinated everything to that
ultimate concern. Anything is permissible and indeed is good if it benefits the
working class.[3]
When that ultimate concern is paired with militant atheism, there is nothing to
stop the Marxists and Marxist-Leninists from committing the atrocities they
eventually committed.
For example, Stalin starved between
3 and 4 million Ukrainians to death. Why? because doing so, he claimed,
advanced the cause of socialism. That is, it advanced the welfare of the
working class. There is nothing in Marxism to give individual human lives any
value. There is no God, there are only socio-economic classes determined by
their particular relationship to the means of production. Wellbeing is a
collective matter not an individual one. So killing one human being is
perfectly acceptable. So is killing 4 million human beings as long as the
killers can maintain that they do it to benefit their ideology’s idol, the
working class.
All secular ideologies operate the
same way. They all remove the spiritual from human life. They remove the divine
from human life. They kill God. They leave no ground for true morality. They
leave no ground for common decency. They make anything that conforms to the
ideology permissible even moral. In this way, Nazism and Marxism-Leninism functioned
identically. They were both secular. Neither of them had any grounding for the
value of human life be it individual or collective. There was nothing in either
of them to stop them from committing mass murder, and commit mass murder they
both did.
Secular ideologies are actually a
form of dehumanization, or at least both Nazism and Marxism were. For Nazism,
only true Germans were truly human. Everyone else was subhuman. For Marxism,
only the working class had any value. Everyone else was, in practice if not
quite in theory, subhuman. Secular ideologies make it possible for some people
to dehumanize other people. All secular ideologies are idolatrous, and it makes
little or no difference what a particular ideology’s idol is. It can be the
Germans. It can be the proletariat. It can be one’s nation. All of those idols
facilitate the dehumanization of “the other,” the ones the ideology blames for
the problems a people, a class, or a nation face. Dehumanization combined with
secular ideology is a deadly mix. It is always a deadly mix, or at least it has
the potential of becoming one. That’s what it did in the case both of Nazism
and of Soviet Marxism.
Then there are those two other
factors that I mentioned above that played a role in making the atrocities of
the bloodlands possible. One is the human tendency to obey whatever orders
someone understood as superior gives. This human tendency gets parodied as an actor saying, in a fake German accent
of course, “I was only following orders!” We can hear it as a joke, but it is
in fact what the former Nazis said in their own defense at the Nuremburg trials
and elsewhere. I once asked an American military veteran if the people of the
US military would obey an order to launch a massive nuclear attack on another
nation. Such an attack would surely inflict at least as much death and
destruction as World War II did, almost certainly more. My veteran said “Yes.
They would.” Once again I want to ask: How could they? The answer is, they have
committed themselves to an organization that makes obeying orders both a
necessity and a high virtue, so they would obey even that order. Most of the
German and Soviet people who actually carried out the atrocities of the
bloodlands were just following orders.
And we must never underestimate the
power of self-interest in human decisions. Most if not all of the people who committed
the atrocities of the bloodlands were in an impossible position. They had been
told to do something most of them surely were at least reluctant to do. I mean,
who wouldn’t be reluctant to turn the valve that released the deadly gas into a
space filled with other human beings? Yet a lot of people did it. A lot of
people shot hundreds or even thousands of other people in the back of the head,
something most of them surely weren’t enthusiastic about doing. But they had
been given their orders, and they knew that things could go very badly for them
if they did not obey those orders. Neither Stalin’s NKVD nor Hitler’s SS would
tolerate disobedience. For at least many of the people who actually carried out
the killing in the bloodlands, it was either kill or be killed. In that
situation, a few people will choose to be martyrs and refuse to kill, but most
people won’t. Most people will kill others if they have to in order to avoid
being killed themselves. Sometimes they’ll even do it to avoid negative
consequences for themselves less extreme than death.
So here’s one truth I wish more
Americans understood. We were not the primary victims of the European theater
of World War II. The people of the bloodlands, especially the Jews and the
Poles, were. Yes, we suffered. Far too many families lost loved ones, and one
family losing one loved one is one too many. But the suffering of the
bloodlands and of the entire Soviet Union dwarfed American suffering by large
orders of magnitude. Far too few of us recognize our debt to the Soviet Union,
to the Russians in particular, for being the primary force that defeated Nazi
Germany. The tide of the European war did not turn on D-Day. It turned at
Stalingrad, the battle of which was long over before D-Day and was a battle
fought by the Soviets.
Here's another. Far too few
Americans understand the dynamics and power of dehumanization. We may be quick
to condemn the Germans for dehumanizing Jews and Slavs. We may be quick to
condemn the Soviet Communists for dehumanizing supposed class enemies. But we
Americans dehumanize our opponents too. In both world wars Germans weren’t
Germans to us, they were “krauts.” In both Korea and Vietnam, our Asian enemies
weren’t Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese people, they were “gooks.” It was a
whole lot easier for our military to kill krauts than it was for them to kill
German human beings. It was a whole lot easier for them to kill gooks than to
kill Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese human beings.
No, we Americans have done more
than our share of harm in the world, but we didn’t shoot and gas six million
Jews the way the Germans did. Nonetheless, we are hardly innocent when it comes
to genocide. We white Americans committed genocide against the people of the
First Nations of North America. We don’t like to admit it, but Hitler knew it.
He used what we did to the Indians as a model for what he was going to do to
the Jews. We actually killed more Indians than Hitler killed Jews.
We must always be vigilant to
oppose any slide into secular ideology that we perceive taking place among us.
We’ve already begun that slide. Our secular idol is commonly our nation. We
expect salvation from our nation. We will do anything for our nation. We will
kill for our nation. Yet our nation is a purely abstract, secular construct. We
make it our god, but it isn’t God. It isn’t close to being God. In American
politics today, the idolization of America is stronger than it has been for
quite some time. We must do everything we can to stop it. We must never again
think up unhuman names for our opponents be our conflict with them military or
merely economic. We must not dehumanize anyone. We must refuse to obey illegal
or immoral orders no matter who issues them. We must be willing to make
personal sacrifices to avoid committing crimes against humanity.
So in the final analysis, how could
something like the bloodlands happen? How could human beings intentionally kill
14 million other human beings? They, we, could because all of us are human. We
aren’t gods and goddesses. We are fallible mortals. We make mistakes. We make
big mistakes. We are prone to idolatry. We are quick to dehumanize. If you
doubt that, look at what Donald Trump says about immigrants into our country. Nothing
can ever truly justify one human being killing even one other human being. Certainly
nothing can justify human beings killing millions upon millions of other human
beings as happened in the first half of the twentieth century. So do we get it?
I sure wish more of us did.
[1]
Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic
Books, New York, 2010).
[2] Snyder
seems not to include the US Civil War casualties in this number. The Civil War
was, after all, not a foreign war. If we include Civil War casualties, Snyder’s
number drops from 13 million to closer to 12 million.
[3] In
Marxism-Leninism, anything becomes permissible and even good if it benefits the
Communist Party, but we needn’t go into that issue here.
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