THE extermination of European Jewry has come to epitomise absolute evil in our version of the history of the 20th century. Some historians consider the memory of the Shoah to be a new civil religion of the western world, a negative yardstick by which to measure the legitimacy of our democratic institutions.
Everyone agrees that the Shoah is a major anthropological and ethical caesura in the history of Europe, but there is no consensus when it comes to interpreting it. Some historians trace its origin to Hitler’s radical antisemitism, others to the context of the second world war, still others to the complex polycentric and charismatic power system of the Nazi regime. Since the end of the war there has been a strong temptation to dismiss Nazism as an anti-western aberration, the exact antithesis of the values of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. This reassuring diagnosis was the basis of the culture of the Resistance. It was taken up by sociologists such as Norbert Elias, who saw Nazi violence as symptomatic of process of “decivilisation”, and philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, who maintained that Germany did not join the West until after Auschwitz (1).
This diagnosis was reworked by the historian François Furet after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. Furet interpreted Nazism and communism as symmetrical forms of reaction against the inevitable advent of a liberal political order (2). In this view, the world in which we live is diametrically opposed to Nazi barbarity. There is no point of contact, no proximity, and no continuity between the two.
It is, of course, true that Nazism set out to destroy the universalist concept of humanity propounded by the Enlightenment and illustrated by the French Revolution, and that the concept is preserved and furthered by modern western democracies. (Much could be said about the way in which they preserve and further it, but that is not the purpose of this article.)
But that is to consider only one aspect of the problem. There are many other threads that link the ideology of Nazism and its methods (domination and extermination) with the history of the West. Despite its pathological aberrations, they make it part of the historical development of the West.
The first link is ideological. Nazism emerged in the socio-political constellation of German nationalism, which was crisscrossed by currents well represented in European culture as a whole: racial anthropology, with its idea of a hierarchy of human groups dominated by “Aryans”; Social Darwinism, with its concept of natural selection of the fittest; and eugenics, with its reactionary utopia of an artificially created higher species.
The salvatory antisemitism of Nazism saw the struggle against the Jews as a crusade against evil that would enable the German nation to liberate itself from the enemy within. It was, however, only a radical expression of an ideology and wide-ranging forms of social discrimination and persecution that were hardly a German monopoly before the second world war. Racial anthropology was well represented in Italy (Cesare Lombroso), Social Darwinism in England (Alfred Russel Wallace), eugenics in the United States (Francis Galton), and antisemitism in France (Eduard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and many others).
Moreover, the exacerbated nationalism and biological racism of the Nazis were closely linked to the culture and practice of imperialism that had characterised the whole of Europe since the beginning of the 19th century. Germany had not played a leading role in this development. On the contrary, it was a latecomer, a keen pupil following the two great colonial powers, France and Britain. The natural supremacy of the white race and its corollary, Europe’s civilising mission in Africa and Asia; the view of the world beyond Europe as a vast area to be colonised; the idea of colonial wars as conflicts in which the enemy was the civilian population of the countries to be conquered, rather than an army; the theory that the extinction of the inferior races was an inevitable consequence of progress: these central tenets of Nazi ideology were commonplaces of 19th-century European culture.
The Nazis’ aim of conquering Lebensraum (living space) for the German race in the vast Slavic territories of eastern Europe was essentially a transposition to the Old World of the model of colonial domination that other great powers had pursued in Africa and Asia for more than a century. Since the Nazis considered the Jews an enemy race, a hotbed of communism and in charge of the Soviet state, a crusade against them fitted in naturally with a war of conquest and extermination in the east. In Hitler’s grand design, the acquisition of Lebensraum, the destruction of the Soviet Union and the extermination of the Jews were complementary aims that converged in a single war (3).
Nazism was also a product of the first world war, the total war that was the real founding experience of the 20th century. Therein lay the roots of industrial extermination, the anonymous death of millions, and the authoritarian remodelling of European societies in the inter-war period. As the historian George Mosse has convincingly demonstrated, the first world war began a brutalisation of political life of which Nazism was the culmination (4). In the context of the civil wars and uprisings that shook Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy between 1918 and 1923, fascism emerged as a typically reactionary, nationalistic and anti-democratic movement. To that extent, it was indeed the offspring of the counter-revolution waged throughout the “long” 19th century, from the anti-Jacobin coalition of 1793 to the massacres that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1872.
But the counter-revolution of the 20th century was neither conservative nor purely reactionary. Rather, it considered itself a revolution against the revolution. The fascists did not look to the past: they sought to build a new world. They found ways to collaborate with the former ruling elites only at the moment of taking power. Their leaders did not come from those elites but from the social refuse of a world thrown into confusion. They were nationalist demagogues who had reneged on the left, such as Mussolini, or lumpen proletarians, such as Hitler, who discovered their rabble-rousing talents in the climate of German defeat. They addressed themselves to the masses, whom they mobilised around regressive myths of nation, race and warrior community and eschatological promises, such as the thousand-year Reich.
The experience of war taught the Nazis the need to combine certain values inherited from the 19th-century struggle against the Enlightenment with modern racism (scientistic and biological), the worship of technology, and the cult of force and industry. However, as has been stressed by a vast sociological literature in recent years, the modernity of Nazism lies above all in its exterminatory practice. The Nazi genocide was predicated on the state monopoly of violence, which Norbert Elias, following Thomas Hobbes, had interpreted one-sidedly as a vector of social pacification and thus of civilisation. Indeed, the monopoly of force at the origin of the modern state was the sine qua non for the totalitarian genocides and violence of the 20th century - their Hobbesian paradigm.
A functional analysis of the Nazi death camps also shows their close relationship with western modernity. Auschwitz was modelled throughout on the Taylorist principle of productive rationality, with death as the end product of a “rational” processing of raw material - deported Jews. It was a mass-production corpse factory in which the assembly line was the arrival of convoys, selection, confiscation of possessions, undressing, gas chamber and crematory oven.
Inevitably, the extermination camps also embraced the administrative rationality described by Max Weber in Economy and Society: division of labour, hierarchical decision-making, separation of ideation (the process of forming ideas) and of their execution, bureaucratisation and deresponsibilisation.
Like Maurice Papon at his trial in Bordeaux, none of the accused at Nuremberg considered themselves guilty: all had simply followed orders. In the majority of cases, their tasks became criminal only at the end of a complex chain of activity that was invisible to most of them, or easily ignored. Hannah Arendt noted that Nazism had given birth to a new type of executioner, the bureaucrat at his desk, who killed by filling in forms (5). Finally, the genocidal assembly line required, on the part of the many operatives involved, some of the self-control of impulses that Freud defined and Elias subsequently incorporated in his analysis of the civilisatory process.
The history of the Shoah has its share of fanaticism, hatred and unbridled violence, especially in connection with the massacres by the SS Sonderkommandos and the Wehrmacht police battalions. But the cold-blooded industrial extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers was conceived as a process that could do without hatred. Rather, it relied on the sense of duty of the functionary who carries out his tasks efficiently and impersonally, without letting his feelings interfere, and scrupulously avoids any questioning of the end purpose of his work.
The relationship of Nazism to western modernity is thus essential to an understanding of its origins and the history of Nazi violence. Liberal 19th-century Europe - the heartland of racism, imperialism and colonial war - was the cultural and ideological laboratory in which Nazism developed. That development was not inevitable, since it required several intermediate stages, from the first world war to the crisis of the Weimar republic. But there is a clear line of descent. At the same time, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have stressed, the Shoah testifies to a negative dialectic, whereby technical and material progress was transformed into human and social regression.
Auschwitz must be understood in a wider historical context than that of Nazism, the second world war, or the totalitarian systems of the 20th century. Rather than a phenomenon without precedent, it was a unique synthesis of elements at work in our civilisation. Despite its pathological manifestations, Nazism was deeply rooted in the history, culture and technology of the modern world, and in modern forms of organisation, production and domination.