Can A Bureaucratic System Explain Away The Holocaust!
The fact of my work is not simply in the retelling of History. It is in confronting the neglect of that History and its moral duty to those displaced by it. Those displaced are the victims, the weak who were unprotected by those best able to protect. There were the vulnerable, whose loss to Humanity sears through our consciousness. A bully rallied support and these managed together and were allowed to pick upon those who were isolated, segregated and Ghettoised. That these were the Jews of Europe, made a difference to me in that they were the victims of an Intolerable abuse, and clearly, our Indifference showed the way to those who had clubbed together to beat, mistreat and Murder them. For no other reason than because they were Jews, we stood idly by and allowed this to happen. For me, as I now write on behalf of these 6,000,000 Murdered Jews of Europe, The Holocaust might one day stand by me and attest to my willingness to remember not to forget.
History can own a Student, Researcher and Writer. I had an interest in Hitler before I found The Holocaust. How an insignificant man could galvanise a Nation into War, and with such startling successes initially, was intriguing. The Blitzkrieg struck a chord. But then it became obvious that this man was no simple leader of men. He commanded with utter disregard for the efficacy of the lives he commanded and then, reprehensibly, the lives of those People he insisted should die. Hitler was a petty man with petty ideals and his grandiose World view was nothing but a harboured resentment of all that was Jewish. All that Hitler wasn’t and all that he could not become, he resented. From an early age, that view of the World became an ever more localised focus upon the Destruction of The Jewish People. With the prospect of the Conquest of Nations fast diminishing, after the initial euphoria of success had subsided, the destructive process continued.
When it came to the subjugation of Peoples, there were those who were most expendable, The Jews! Those expendable were the Gypsies, Poles, the infirm, Homosexuals and those from religious sects Hitler did not agree with. So now we have a Bureaucratic system designed to deal with aspects of Foreign Policy, an Internal Policy, the Church, the Medical Establishment, the War effort and of course, the entire Structure of the Destructive devices aimed toward a Final Solution with the Jewish People. Layer upon layer of administration was added so that Hitler could get on with the minutiae of the German way. What Hitler did not meddle in, was largely confined to the actual participation in the schemes, War and Murderous undertakings he was happy to leave his underlings to accomplish.
Hitler’s erstwhile take on the Eugenics of Race theory was a delusional hash of some form of ‘aryanisation’ of a class of Germans which did not exist. Aryan theory however, did persist in Hitler’s mind. Toward this final end, Hitler created and allowed to become independent what was clearly not autonomous. It was a bureaucracy of hate led by Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann and all other Murderers in between, fed by – and answerable to – Hitler. What some, like Hannah Arendt called a banality of evil, did not reside in Hitler’s state for Destruction. Though Himmler was an insipid character, Heydrich was not vapid nor was Eichmann’s command of the final resolve diluted in any way.
When Hitler wanted a War, he commanded War and Keitel, Jodl, Runstedt, Manstein and Guderian provided the means to that end. When victory comes and it did, quite spectacularly in the beginning, it is to Hitler that the plaudits are demanded and homage is paid? When the inevitable consequences of Hitler’s meddling brought about a reverse in fortunes, the administrative juggernaut was at fault, not Hitler. Hitler had looked at the finite detail but could not discern the overall grasp of what leads to overall victory, that ability to adapt and bring about change at the head of the effort on the ground. Hitler was swift to remove all those Generals he blamed for the losses he incurred by virtue of his dictatorial manner. There was disagreement amongst Hitler’s Generals and when they stood their ground, Hitler had them dismissed, not shot!
When Hitler took a giant leap and sought to inveigle all of Germany, and its Bureaucratic network, and more importantly, the German peoples into the push for a Final Solution of that Jewish question, none refused admission. Those that did were not to suffer the same fate as those Hitler demanded be Murdered. When it came to the administration of the deed, Himmler, Heydrich, Hoess, Stangl, Eichmann, Rasch and Blobel were keen to administer. None availed of the opportunity to desist, refuse or suggest their moral conscience could not allow them such a monsterous undertaking. Those who managed to escape back to a desk, and away from the Killing, administered the Slaughter from a distance. What these bureaucrats of Hitler’s had managed, was an orchestration of Hitler’s demands which could be manipulated from such close proximity to the Slaughter. That immediacy was for them to be standing right next to the Gas Chambers and the Pits, watching the progression of Jews toward extinction. What they witnessed, what they saw, what they enabled was linked back to Hitler by the very deed, communicated in Person and in wordy extracts deciphered by Mueller, Bormann and a clique of bureaucrats in an inner sanctum so that Hitler could know his goal was being achieved.
In every technocracy, it is essential that information flowing down is also assembled and fed back along the same line. Communication is a two way process and can all but stifle the clear direction demanded if it is not adhered to. So for those who insist that Hitler’s dialogue went one way, and the process of it being carried out stalled at the point of execution, that is not the way the process works. The implicit demands in War were met and Hitler knew their outcome. The same is true of The Final Solution, otherwise the Reich would be besieged by anarchy. Trains alone required the movement of the Jews toward their Murder, this could not be accomplished without Hitler’s War effort being severely impeded.
So for all stages of die Endlosung der Judenfrage, this could not be consigned to a ‘page in history’ without Hitler checking the minor detail of whether Jews were actually Murdered or not! Too many officials it seems, acted in accord with the Hitler system of Destruction and acted without conscience. They knew they had a moral duty to their own beliefs, but chose to direct their capacity as administrators in the mass Murder of Innocent Jews, Gypsies, the sick and the Infirm, in the belief that they were not just doing what Hitler wanted but what they too accepted was conscionable? Their duty as human beings became subjected to an administrative demand which they countenanced with their involvement. Could they have acted differently? They could have refused to act as Murderers or administrators of a Murderous enterprise, but declined to act with any sort of decency!
Day 13: Lebensraum’s Solution! 