Assessing Adolf Hitler

I finally got around to reading Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist, essayist, and novelist. I had ignorantly neglected it on the shelves for several years; I thought, wrongly, that it was a psychobabble assessment of Adolf Hitler that "explained" the anti-Semitic, war-making monster Hitler became later in life. In fact, the book is less an analysis of Hitler than an analysis of the various explanations that have been put forward to explain the Nazi dictator. The result is profoundly disturbing and important.

These analyses of Hitler range from the ridiculous to the plausible: his aggression can be explained by the overweening love of his mother and his lack of a testicle, or because of an abusive father; his anti-Semitism can be explained because he contracted syphilis from a Jewish whore, or because his grandmother had served as a maid in a Jewish household that paid for Hitler's father's upbringing - had his grandmother been impregnated by the 19-year-old son of the family? Hitler was extinguishing the Jew in himself by annihilating the Jews of Europe, this explanation suggests. Hitler's mother died of cancer in 1907 under the care of a Jewish physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch; perhaps Hitler wanted to kill all of the Jews for this reason? Some suggest that Hitler's abnormal presence in history and geopolitics can be explained due to sexual perversions, such as (undocumented except by hearsay) coprophilia and undinism. What of Geli Raubal, Hitler's half-niece upon whom he was fixated? Hermann Göring, the second-ranking man in Nazi Germany, said that after her death (ruled a suicide) in 1931, Hitler changed. Yes, he had never been a humanitarian, but after her death he shut off all human feeling. This is eerily similar to the mysterious suicide of Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died a year after Raubal; Stalin too was said to have shut off all remaining humanness he may have had after this incident. Did Raubal commit suicide because of Hitler's perversions, because of something abnormal about him? Did Hitler have her killed? These are interesting questions but the disproportionate emphasis placed on them by psychoanalysts and psychohistorians is absurd. The skeptical Rosenbaum, while wading in these theories and explaining them in detail, is similarly unconvinced.

Rosenbaum also dives into, in my opinion, more serious attempts to understand Hitler: was he convinced of his own rectitude, as per the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, or was he an actor who eventually became convinced of his own role, as per the historian Alan Bullock? Does Hitler represent an "eruption of demonism into history", as posited by theologian Emil Fackenheim, or was the Holocaust caused by German "eliminationist anti-Semitism" as per political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose thesis significantly minimizes Hitler's role in the Holocaust? Can we believe in a loving God, or God at all, in light of the Holocaust? When did Hitler decide to kill the Jews? Was it in November 1918, when he heard of the German capitulation while recovering from a gas attack at the military hospital in Pasewalk (as per historian Lucy Dawidowicz) or was it at some point in 1941, in reaction to either a) the initial victories in the Soviet Union or b) the setbacks in the Soviet Union that winter (there is no historical consensus, and this is a matter for enormous debate, but most historians place the decision to murder the Jews at some point in 1941, not decades beforehand). 

The inability to "diagnose" Hitler is disturbing. Few people have had more ink spilled about them. Much attention has been paid to Hitler not only by scholars, but by novelists, filmmakers, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large. Hitler sells. Yet it seems we cannot begin to understand him. The range of arguments about what made Hitler Hitler, what made him commit his monstrous deeds, is a very telling indicator of this fact. The ratio of words written about and the attention paid to Hitler to the actual understanding of what made Hitler tick is astronomical. Indeed, some, most prominently the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, argue strenuously that even attempting to understand Hitler is to exculpate him from his crimes. 

Lanzmann, absurdly, suggests that to try to understand Hitler or the Nazis is akin to Holocaust denial. He credits this stance to Primo Levi. Levi, the author of many important books and a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote a passage in his book Survival in Auschwitz that, raving from thirst upon his arrival in the camp, he grabbed an icicle dangling from a barrack. Before he could put it in his mouth, it was ripped from him by an SS guard. Levi, distraught, pleaded, "Why?" and the SS man responded, "Hier ist kein warum" (here there is no why). Lanzmann takes this cynical statement by a brutal SS man and proceeds to make it his worldview on how to approach studying and analyzing the Holocaust and the Nazis. Perhaps there is no why in a grotesque place like Auschwitz, but to silence the attempt to even ask the question (as Lanzmann has done, publicly and aggressively) is, ironically, totalitarian.

I have been reading about Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust for as long as I can remember. I can rattle off the hows, the whats, the wheres, the whens, and the who's. As disturbing as this all is, it is the whys that has kept me up nights. It is an eternal question that can never be answered, and for that reason is profoundly disturbing. Yes, we know that SS men clambered onto the short roofs of Birkenau's crematoria and poured in pellets of Zyklon B; we know the mechanisms of how Zyklon B entered the chamber and how the system of introduction was designed to make the killing more efficient; we know where this happened; we know when it happened; we know the identities of the men who poured the pellets, of the men who lied to the Jews and told them they were just being deloused, of the men who ran the camps and the entire extermination program. But why? The Jews represented no economic, political, or military danger to Germany. Yet they were hunted mercilessly in the cities, the villages, and the forests of Europe, so that every last one of them could be murdered. Heinrich Himmler made it a priority to visit Finland and ask that government to turn over the 200 Finnish Jews to be "resettled." This was, clearly, an ideological fear and hatred writ large. There was simply no economic, political, or military justification for demanding the deportation of these 200 Finnish Jews; they were to be murdered because they were Jews. This is chilling. This is something that I can never, and will never, understand. 

This differentiates the Nazis' genocidal onslaught from previous or subsequent genocides. The Nazis did, in a sense, believe the Jews to be a fifth column because they were obsessed with the (false) memories of the last days of the First World War: how the Jews had, in their eyes, stabbed the German Army in the back and thus forfeited German honor. This was not to happen again. However, the universalization of this notion, absurd to begin with, to include men, women, and children from the entire European continent and the relentless determination to murder them all, unless if they were temporarily useful for the German war effort: this is unique. Jewish men were considered a Bolshevik menace; they had to be killed. If their women were left alive, they would not be able to provide for themselves, and would be a headache to the Nazi state; they had to be killed. The children could not be separated from their mothers in a "tidy" fashion, and in the future they would represent the avengers of their parents; they, too, had to be killed. 

I have been ruminating over the nature of Hitler for the last several days, and I find myself not knowing what to believe. I do not know if he was a convinced anti-Semite from his bohemian days in Vienna, or if he became one once immersed in the postwar chaos of Munich. I do not know if he foresaw the extermination of the Jews from his younger days or not. I do not know why he thought what he thought, which remained remarkably consistent from 1919 Munich, through Mein Kampf (composed in 1924), through the Machtergreifung of 1933, the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the beginning of the wholesale murder of Jews in the summer of 1941, all the way to his suicide in the otherworldly Führerbunker in April 1945. I do not know if Hitler was a raving lunatic in his private life, as he was in his harangues in the Nuremberg rallies, or if this was just an act, and he shed his skin upon returning to his private quarters (I lean toward a fusion of the two, which is cheating, I know). 

Even how one analyzes the Holocaust is inseparable from how one analyzes Hitler. Did Hitler always intend a Holocaust, although not necessarily the one that occurred? Or did he just want the Jews "out" but had to improvise due to wartime contingencies? Did the Holocaust come from top-down orders (i.e., Hitler to Himmler/Heydrich to Eichmann downward) or was it the culmination of organic, grassroots processes to "solve" the "Jewish question"? Historians argue vociferously about what time in 1941 the go-ahead for the extermination of the Jews was given, as mentioned above. This also reflects one's view of Hitler. Was it before the invasion of the Soviet Union and inseparable from that ideological conflict? To follow up from this: Did Hitler make the decision due to the euphoria that came with the victories in the early stages of the invasion? Did the decision come when the Nazis failed to take Moscow and Leningrad, and then did not know what else to do with the Jews that they had cooped up in the ghettos of Poland, other than murder them? This last theory makes Hitler and the Nazis much less ideological in their pursuit of exterminating the Jews and more "pragmatic": there was not enough food to go around, and there was the danger of disease, so the Jews needed to be killed. Or did the decision come in December 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack, after the war truly became global in scope? Because in January 1939, Hitler had made a "prophecy" that in the event of a world war, the result would not be the victory of international Jewry ("and therefore the Bolshevization of  the earth") but the destruction of the European Jews. Was it time now to make this prophecy a reality? 

Again, I take the Goldilocks position. I believe that Hitler was necessary for the Holocaust to have happened, and that not just anyone in his position would have done the same(to take the title of the 1984 Milton Himmelfarb essay in Commentary, "No Hitler, No Holocaust"). Would a Nazi Germany headed by Hermann Göring have embarked on what became the Holocaust? Obviously, I don't know, but I don't think so. Hitler's ideology and hatred suffused the Nazi leadership as well as the middlemen in the bureaucracy and lower-ranking individuals of the SS, the army, and the police. It gave them the general parameters in which to work. However, unlike the popular conception of the Nazi regime as streamlined and centralized, it was rather decentralized and chaotic. Hitler, the Social Darwinist who was obsessed with "survival of the fittest", made his regime a jungle in which his ministers were constantly fighting for his favor. Rosenberg clashed with Goebbels, Himmler with Göring, Bormann with everyone; the SS was pitted against the civilian bureaucracy and the army; within the SS, the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA, or Economic and Administration Office) and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office) clashed for influence; and so on. In the words of historian and Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, Nazi officials "worked toward the Führer": they had an idea of what he wanted and they took the initiative to act upon it. Those who put forward the idea closest to Hitler's heart (usually the most radical of initiatives) were successful: Himmler and Heydrich were particularly successful in this arena. So, the Holocaust was the fusion of a top-down, Hitler-driven, ideological approach and a bottom-up, proactive, sycophantic approach. While historians have been biting each others' heads off about these issues since the Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") of the 1970s, they are not, in my opinion, mutually exclusive. I am not persuaded by the arguments of the exclusively intentionalist ("Hitler always intended to exterminate the Jews") or the exclusively functionalist ("The Holocaust was the product of initiatives by middle-ranking bureaucrats largely driven by self-interest"). 

Where do I place Hitler? Was he dithering, hesitant in giving the green light to the Final Solution? Was he a laughing maniac who delighted in the annihilation of the Jews, as concluded by Rosenbaum? Somewhere in between? Somewhere else? I don't know. That is the insane thing about Hitler. As I wrote before, for as much as has been written about him, he is a mystery. The more I read about him, the less I know or understand about him. Should I even bother understanding him? The attempt is challenging and very, very disturbing. What does Hitler say about the capacity of humans to do evil? Or was he beyond the range of human capacity, off the charts, standards of deviations away from even the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world? The last is the view of the theologian Emil Fackenheim, and I have to disagree. As profoundly disturbing as it is to contemplate, Hitler was human, just as human as you and me. But that is not enlightening in and of itself. Okay, great, he was human. So what? The more interesting questions are: Why? Why did he embark on such destruction? And what was his motivation? He was anti-Semitic, sure, but there are lots of anti-Semites. There was only one Hitler. 

This post consisted of a lot of questions. But that is indicative of the matter at hand. For all that is written about Adolf Hitler, I still think there are more questions than answers.

The Nazis, Poland, and the Jews

My time spent in Poland, specifically Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, got me thinking about Nazi policy in Poland during the Second World War. This is one of my main historical interests and is largely the reason for my having traveled to Poland in the first place.

Because of its Jewish population and location (in the way of the Nazis' desired expansion), present-day Poland was the location of all six extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek). Its non-Jewish population was also ravaged, as they were deported from their homes and requisitioned for forced labor. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave an order that the entire city was to be destroyed and its population slaughtered: indeed, 85% of the city was left in ruins and 200,000 people were killed.

German policy toward the Poles differed from their policies toward the nations it subsequently conquered in Western Europe, and in many ways presaged what was to come after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Gestapo had drawn up the names of 60,000 prominent Polish intellectuals, professionals, priests, etc. - these were hunted down and put against the wall. In a particularly infamous event, some 180 professors of Krakow's prestigious Jagiellonian University were arrested in one swoop. They subsequently died in Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps in the German Reich.

Where did the Poles stand in Nazi theory? Hitler himself did not seem particularly interested in Poland or the Poles until the late 1930s, when he and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop tried unsuccessfully to extort the Poles into giving the Germans some of their newly-won lands. In the aftermath of the First World War, Germany had lost a swathe of its former territories, known as the Danzig Corridor, that sliced through Germany and gave the Poles access to the sea at Danzig (Gdansk in Polish), which was declared a Free City by the League of Nations. When the Poles did not agree to cede the lands to Hitler, the Nazi leader and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels vented their fury on the nation. They concentrated on Polish discrimination against ethnic Germans living in Poland (which was actually occurring, although Goebbels greatly exaggerated it). Further, Poland was necessary for Germanic settlement and as a launching pad for future aggression against the Soviet Union.

Hitler, with utter contempt for the Western Allies, who had not raised a finger as he renewed German conscription and rearmament, remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and finally swallowed up all of Czechoslovakia, decided to invade Poland, assured (especially by Ribbentrop) that France and Britain would not intervene. When they declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Hitler was furious; his desire for a limited war to expand German Lebensraum had now become a war involving the great European powers. 

He did have an ace in the hole, however. On August 23, 1939, von Ribbentrop had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin's Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The two nations agreed not to fight one another and also, in a secret protocol, split Poland and the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia) between them. Following this, on September 17, 1939 the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. The Polish army fought bravely but futilely against the two great powers. While Britain and France had declared war, they did nothing to help. 

The Nazis' administration was, in true Nazi fashion, fairly confusing, with various overlapping power centers. Two areas were annexed to the Reich: the Wartheland (today's Western Poland, centered in Posen) and Danzig-West Prussia. They were under the rule of, respectively, Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, two Old Fighters of the Nazi Party who loathed each other. The area between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers became known as the General Government, with its capital at Krakow, and was put under the leadership of Hans Frank, who ruled like a medieval despot from Wawel Castle. He clashed repeatedly with the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who reported directly to Himmler. 

The Germans began almost immediately to send in Germans from the Baltic States to the Wartheland; room was made for them by shoving out the Poles and the Jews, who wound up in the General Government, much to Frank's chagrin. It was not yet known what would be done with the Jews: major ghettoes were set up in Lodz and Warsaw, into which hundreds of thousands were crammed, first to be concentrated for deportation to somewhere near Lublin, then to Madagascar (an absurd idea that, nonetheless, prompted serious thought in top Nazi circles), and then, finally, somewhere to the "East" after an invasion of the Soviet Union. At this point, Jews were being shot out of hand, their synagogues were burned to the ground, and Jewish men were humiliated by German soldiers who grinned as they cut their beards and sidecurls. However, at this time, there was no plan for their systematic extermination. The Lodz ghetto actually became productive, but overpopulation led to disease and starvation, and the Jews, concentrated to eventually go somewhere, were stuck after the failures of the Lublin settlement plan, the Madagascar plan, and of the stalled invasion in the Soviet Union, which petered out before Moscow in December 1941. What was to be done? 

Arthur Greiser, the hardline Gauleiter (regional leader) of the Wartheland, in whose territory Lodz was located, thought it best to have them murdered. Jews were sent from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno, not far from the city, where they were gathered into a manor house, made to undress, and loaded into vans. The back of the vans were hermetically sealed and the vehicles' exhaust was rerouted into them, killing the Jews via carbon monoxide poisoning. The van drove to a wooded location nearby and the dead Jews were buried in mass graves. This was the first of the death camps. It was established to "solve" a purely local "problem" in the Wartheland. This is a microcosm of the Nazi decision-making apparatus, which went as follows: Hitler gave the general parameters, but local leaders were given leeway in how to get it done. Hitler's role throughout the Second World War was always as a radical prod, as was the case with Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. When the latter two visited Einsatzgruppen killing sites in the East, invariably more radically murderous policies would follow.

Himmler appointed one of his most loyal and brutal henchmen, Odilo Globocnik, as the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of the Lublin district. The Lublin district contained Zamosc, a lovely Renaissance city southeast of the city of Lublin, the countryside around which contains fertile soil. Zamosc was to be the centerpiece of the German "warrior farmers" and was originally to be named Himmlerstadt. ("Himmler City"). Globocnik needed to make room for these "warrior farmers". The Poles and the Jews needed to go. At first he set about putting the Jews to work in building roads and entirely useless defensive military fortifications. After a meeting with Himmler, construction began on the Belzec death camp in November 1941. Stationary gas chambers disguised as showers were put to work here, building on the system used in Germany's euthanasia program.

Belzec was located in a remote location on the Lvov-Lublin railway. Jews were packed into trains from regions throughout Poland, especially the Lublin district but also from Krakow and elsewhere. Upon arrival, they were told that they had arrived at a transit camp on the way to a destination further east, and that they had to shower and delouse before continuing their journey. They were made to undress and women's hair was shorn. Then, naked and terrified, they were chased down the Schlauch ("tube") to the awaiting gas chambers. 600,000 or so Jews were murdered at Belzec. Another camp, in Sobibor, opened its doors in May 1942 and yet another, Treblinka, the graveyard of the Jews of Warsaw, in July 1942. They operated largely on the initial blueprint of Belzec, with Treblinka the most advanced of the three camps, which together operated under the aegis "Operation Reinhard," commanded by Globocnik. Altogether, these three camps killed some 1.7 million Jews by October 1943.

Today, there are hardly any physical remnants of these camps, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. There was not much to them. They were "primitive" relative to those much larger sites, and they had but one purpose: to murder the Jews. Some Jews were kept on hand to help deceive further victims, to cut their hair, to serve as tailors, shoemakers, maids, etc for the SS, and to remove the dead from the gas chambers, remove any valuables (including ripping gold teeth out of the corpses' mouths and searching vaginas for anything hidden), and at first bury, and later burn, them. Because these were pure murder factories, unlike Birkenau and Majdanek, which had slave labor purposes as well, no extensive infrastructure was needed and the camps' buildings were destroyed and trees were planted. In the case of Treblinka, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build a house for a Ukrainian guard, who was told to inform any inquirers that he had lived there throughout the war and that nothing had happened in the area.

While all of this was happening to the Jews of Poland, and abroad, the Nazis continued to deport Poles from their homesteads and drafted them into forced labor in the Reich. Here, they were subject to the most draconian of punishments: nearly any step "out of line" (which was defined very, very generously) warranted the death penalty. For example, obsessed as the Nazis were with race, if a Polish forced laborer had any sexual relations with a German woman, he would be executed. The Poles were treated little better than animals, which is how they were regarded by the Nazis.

This brings us to the main difference between the persecutory policies vis-a-vis the Jews and the Poles that were pursued by the Nazis. The Poles, as Slavs, were held in contempt as an inferior race that had no further purpose than to serve their German masters. They were to be kept uneducated and employed in industries that did not require much technical skill, such as road-building. They were to be fed, if at all, well after their German "superiors." The Nazis did not hesitate to shoot or to hang them at the slightest provocation, which is attested to by the massive death toll of the Polish population during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Jews suffered a very specific fate, which separated them from not only the Poles, but other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals.

The Nazis were obsessed with the Jews. Their hatred for them is astonishing for any reasoned, educated person. The frequency with which Hitler and Goebbels fulminated against the Jews in their private utterances is remarkable, and no other group of people came up nearly as much. In Hitler's political testament, dictated to Martin Bormann a mere days before the Führer's suicide, he rails against the "Jewish conspiracy" that he had tried his damnedest to fight. The Jews were the "poisoner" of all peoples. Their extermination is hinted at and justified for the defense of European civilization. Anti-Semitism was the linchpin of National Socialist ideological thought. The Slavs could be brushed aside as an inferior civilization but the Jews were seen as the only competing power structure that could compete with the Aryan race for global domination. While Hitler admired the English, he believed fervently that they were held in the grip of Jewish puppeteers, as were the U.S. (which Hitler held in contempt) and the Soviets (which Hitler loathed as the center of the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.") The hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of Hitler's worldview, which drove him from the beginning of his political career in Munich in 1919 to the final, pathetic days in his bunker in April 1945. They needed to be exterminated because, otherwise, they would triumph over the Aryan race. Indeed, Hitler saw the German defeat in both world wars as Jewish victories.  The Nazis did not feel contemptuous of the Jews: they hated them with an inexplicable passion and feared them. While Hitler and Himmler thought very little of Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals, they were not the target of a systematic, obsessive project, as the Jews were, to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Thoughts On Auschwitz

Auschwitz. The very name conjures dread and darkness. One imagines it on some godforsaken, windswept heath, in some sort of parallel universe that receives no light. Auschwitz has come to symbolize the Holocaust and the image of Birkenau's "gate of death" has come to represent the maw through which European Jewry was dragged in 1941-45. 

The majority of Jews were not killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although it was the camp with the single most victims (around 1.1 million). More Jews were collectively killed in the camps of Operation Reinhard (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and later Majdanek) or were shot in the territories of the Soviet Union. Also, we must differentiate between "Auschwitz" and "Birkenau". Auschwitz was the name of the overall complex, but more specifically refers to the main camp. This was mainly a camp for political prisoners and was also a place of murder, although not approaching Birkenau’s toll. This is the location of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. Birkenau is where the vast majority of Jews, and Gypsies, were murdered when we say “Auschwitz”. Birkenau was the site of two provisional gas chambers, made from the abandoned homes of Polish peasants, and then four crematoria buildings that included their own gas chambers. 

Unlike Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Birkenau still, for the most part, stands. Jews from all corners of Europe were killed there. The ruins of its crematoria are visible, as are many barracks (the bricks and wood that are missing from the crematoria and the barracks were used to rebuild the villages near the camp). It would be remiss of me not to mention that Majdanek also stands, and is in fact the most intact of all the Nazi concentration/death camps, but it is much less known and, for all its monstrosity, "only" 80,000 were killed there. Your average person has heard of Auschwitz (although perhaps not Birkenau); he or she has not heard of Majdanek. 

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, I was quite nervous. I have been reading about the place my entire life, but at times, the barbarity of what happened there is so intense that it is very difficult to accept that such a place actually existed. But my bus arrived, and there I was. Unfortunately, if you arrive at Auschwitz (the main camp - this is how I will refer to it, and I will use "Birkenau" to denote the much larger death camp) between the hours of 10-3, you have to go on a guided tour. 

There were tons of tourists, all clicking away with their cameras. High school kids stood around laughing. I went into the visitors' center to purchase my ticket; little do most tourists know, but today’s visitors' center was the reception center for Auschwitz during the war: prisoners were tattooed, given their prison uniforms and wooden clogs, and had their heads shaved, and came out the other end as an anonymous mass. Now the building holds a bookshop, a cinema, some guest rooms, a café, etc. I did not see a sign explaining the building's former purpose, although it's possible that I missed it. Much of what was actually the concentration camp is now parking lots and random buildings outside of the camp; later that night, in my hotel room, I was overtaken by a wave of horror when I realized that, for all I knew, where I was lying was once within the confines of the camp. 

We were ushered under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and taken into various blocks, where we were greeted with the site of false limbs, mountains of human hair, spectacles, pots and pans, suitcases, etc. These piles were massive, and so incomprehensible that I was a bit numbed by the experience. It did not help that I had other tourists bumping into me to take pictures, or that the tour guide whisked us through the rooms rather quickly. This was also the case in Block 11, the punishment block, and the wall in between Blocks 10 and 11, where thousands of prisoners were shot. Even in the crematorium, where the first batches of Jews were killed, as well as others, there were just too many people clicking away and too much speeding us along. I simply did not have the time to register what I was seeing. My nausea and disgust came later, in my hotel room. (When I was in Majdanek, on the other hand, I was basically alone; being in the gas chamber building, the barracks, and the crematoria was so terrifying that I had to physically force myself to carry on). 

The guided tour also brought us to Birkenau. Seeing the "gate of death" in real life, as opposed to a book cover, was jarring. So is seeing Birkenau itself: it is vast. Our tour of it was shorter than that of Auschwitz. After the tour, I returned to my hotel, got a bite to eat, realized with utter horror what I had just seen, but then felt compelled to return. Admission to Birkenau is free, and one does not need a guide. I needed to be there by myself. I needed the space for my thoughts and feelings. 

So I returned to the camp; there it was again, the yawning gatehouse (which contains, by the way, a bookshop and bathrooms; one can climb to the top to get a full view of the camp). I walked from the gatehouse down the tracks, to the point where Jews once disembarked, were screamed at by SS guards, barked at and bitten by Alsatians, and separated from their families. Jews marked for death were marched straight ahead into the compounds of either Crematorium II or III (Crematorium I being the one in the main camp). To the right, on a path through the camp lined with barbed wires, was the path where Jews were marched to their deaths to either Crematorium IV or V.

To finally see this place was bizarre. I have been reading and studying about it so much, and I know the layout of Birkenau; it was like I knew what was around every corner, but this did not lessen the impact of the ruins of the crematoria, where hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered. I walked nearly the entire perimeter of the camp, trying, and failing miserably, to imagine what had happened here 70 years ago. Parts of the camp’s perimeter were serene: the camp was quite empty now. I saw a young man with a plastic bag and a soda bottle in his back pocket, walking down the road between the compounds of Crematoria II and III. He continued to walk through some woods and as I looked I saw that there was a small village, mere yards from the crematoria’s ruins. He must have been returning home and using the camp as a shortcut.

Along the camp’s back edge, there is a quiet wooded area. I saw a rabbit hopping along, and an area with picnic benches and bathrooms. For a moment I felt as though I were on a country walk, but then I turned around and saw the watchtowers and the barbed wire. I came upon the ruins of Bunker II, an abandoned cottage the Nazis had used as a provisional gas chamber. The fields beyond are filled with ashes, as are various ponds that are near the crematoria. So is the grassy area behind Crematorium V. In the summer of 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in Birkenau, the crematoria could not keep up with the task at hand, so the bodies were burned in the open field behind Crematorium V. A placard showed the only three photographs taken surreptitiously by Jews in Birkenau, and one of them shows Jewish prisoners standing in a pile of corpses as smoke billows. This had happened, 70 years before, more or less right where I stood. I felt a sensation in my gut, but my mind was rapidly trying to register what had happened there. It was a useless exercise, because these were crimes beyond human comprehension.

I returned to my hotel, located across the street from the visitors’ center, and was completely shaken. I felt sick to my stomach and completely horrified. Why had I not taken a day trip from Krakow? Why was I staying in this hotel right across the street from Auschwitz, and a five minute bus ride from Birkenau? I desperately wanted human companionship, or a drink to soothe my feelings, but I was alone, the sun had set, and Yom Kippur had begun. After speaking on the phone with my parents, I came to the conclusion that I could not return to the camp. I had meant to go on Yom Kippur but I decided that I couldn’t. I felt haunted, nauseated, dirty, and disturbed. I put a Polish basketball game on the TV for some background noise and somehow managed to fall asleep, and was surprised upon awakening that I hadn’t had any nightmares.

In the morning, I had changed my mind. Perhaps the fact that it was daytime, and that the sun was shining, had an impact on my thinking. Whatever the case, I decided to make a quick return trip to Birkenau. I walked again through the compounds of the crematoria; I am far from a religious person, but I did my best to pray for the lost, whose ashes lay all around my feet. I was startled to see a cat running in the compound of Crematorium III; it was just as startled to see me and ran and hid in the ruins of what had been the gas chambers. I envied the cat for its innocence and ignorance.

I visited the camp’s “sauna”, where prisoners in Birkenau were registered, bathed, and tattooed. There was a devastating exhibit focusing on the stories of individual families, with photographs from family albums. More than 1.1 million people were killed in this place, but here were some of the faces and individual stories. As I looked at the pictures of families on vacation, or at a dinner party, or ice-skating, I began to cry. The vastness of Birkenau, and of the crimes committed there, were too great for me to internalize but when faced with the photo albums of the victims, my emotions overtook me. The same occurred in the “little wood” near Crematorium V, where the Nazis made the Jews wait their turn for the gas chamber during the summer of 1944, when the chambers were working at full capacity. Photos exist of Jews sitting there among the trees, oblivious to the fate that awaited them in mere minutes. Today, placards show some of the photos at the grove. Seeing the photos of the innocent women and children waiting, and standing where they had, was overwhelming.

As I left the camp, I was glad to leave the area, which had profoundly disturbed me. I got on the bus to Krakow, put on my headphones, and felt my eyes grow misty and my tears silently fall. 

Thoughts from Poland

I sit here typing this in a cafe/bar/laundromat in Krakow feeling a swirl of emotions.

My first stop was Warsaw. My heart breaks for the city. Its history in the last century has been singularly devastating. In 1920, the Polish Army under the stewardship of Jozef Piłsudski was able to fend off the Soviets at the Battle of Warsaw. But then came the Nazi Blitzkrieg in September 1939, the occupation, and then, after all of that, the deadly, unwanted embrace of the Soviet Union.

Interwar Poland was a place of great hope, pride, but also disappointment. Poland, since the late 18th century, did not exist as a country. The people of the land continued to speak Polish and to hang onto their culture, which reached its apex (not counting today) in the late 16th century. In the 17th century came the Swedish Deluge, a series of invasions that devastated Poland and left it on its knees. Poland asserted itself again the next century, but was partitioned between the three powers it had the misfortune to be placed between: Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs. Tadeusz Kosciusko, so famous for fighting alongside the Americans in the Revolutionary War, also fought for Polish independence in the 1790s: this was throttled by Russia, which crushed other rebellions in the 19th century. 

Poland finally had its chance in the aftermath of the First World War. It had the misfortune of being the battleground for much of the (all too forgotten) Eastern Front of that war, but politically its outcome worked in the Poles' favor. The Germans and the Austrians had suffered a crushing defeat. The Russians, who fought on the other side of the war, experienced the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, knocking that country out of the war. Russia, for the time being, relinquished its Polish territories (to the Germans), but the Allies took them back from the Germans after the latter's defeat. 

With intense diplomacy, Poland was able to grasp independence. It immediately fought several wars with its neighbors, most significantly against the Soviet Union, and it suffered economically. Its political life was fractured by incessant squabbling in the parliament, the Sejm. But it was a country nonetheless. And then came the Nazis. 

The Nazis swept into Poland and immediately made it clear that they were not be trifled with. They had prepared lists of tens of thousands of Polish elites and intellectuals; they located them, and they shot them. Poles were not to be educated beyond grammar school; they only needed to know enough to be willing servants of their German overlords. The actual policies that the Nazis followed in Poland, a patchwork of insanity, will be explored in a further post. Suffice it to say, Nazi rule was extremely brutal, the Poles were forced into labor and the Jews were concentrated, forced into slave labor, and ultimately, tragically, exterminated. There were 3.2 million Polish Jews on the onset of the Second World War, and nearly all of them were murdered. 

The Polish Home Army, a resistance movement in the Nazi-occupied country, rose in rebellion on August 1, 1944. After 60 some odd days of utter ferocity, the uprising was put down by the Waffen SS, the Wehrmacht, and groups of criminals led by the likes of Bronislav Kaminski and Oskar Dirlewanger, who was a child molester and a necrophiliac. The Nazis killed about 200,000 civilians and methodically destroyed about 85% of the city. You see a lot of ugly communist architecture in Warsaw. The rest of it was, 70 years ago, complete rubble. As I walked the streets of the city, I tried to grasp this fact. Where I was walking there were once smoldering ruins as far as the eye could see, and corpses choking the streets. And while this happened, the Soviets, who did not want an independent Poland and were completely content to see the Poles wiped out, sat on their hands on the east bank of the Vistula River. For this, and for many other reasons, Stalin will never be forgiven in Poland, nor should he. 

This is a massive subject of the utmost historical importance. I cannot possibly give it the respect it deserves in one post, without boring all readers. More soon. 

Central European Trip

The focus of this blog will radically shift direction for the duration of nearly a month (September 24 to October 18) while I travel throughout Central Europe. I fly into Warsaw on September 25 and I hope to visit not only Poland, but Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary as well. It is a balance between trying not to spread myself too thin and trying to see a lot, because this is a part of the world whose history has always fascinated me.

I became interested in history through studying the Holocaust, primarily on my own. The systematic extermination of the Jews, unprecedented in history in terms of its scope and the determination and efficiency of the perpetrators, has always haunted me. My primary interest has been the perpetrators, including Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and Höss, to name some of the most notorious, as well as lower-ranking, anonymous individuals, chronicled so well in the work of the historian Christopher Browning. The question of how men could remorselessly kill countless women and children, and then return home and live normal family lives, has always appalled me, yet at the same time it has drawn me into the study of this dark period, and of other periods (such as the Soviet).

While my focus has been on the murderers, it is time to shift gears and honor the murdered. The colorful scenery of the Jews of Warsaw, Chelm, and the shtetls of Central/Eastern Europe is never to be seen again. It only exists now in sepia-toned photographs, the writings the Jews left, and in the memories of elderly Jews who will not be with us for much longer. For centuries, the Jews lived a (relatively) comfortable existence in Poland, whose king Casimir the Great, in the 14th century, welcomed them as they escaped persecution after the Black Death. It is therefore all too painfully ironic that that same place, Poland, is now the graveyard of the European Jews.

I did not choose these countries for the food, the beer, or the vistas, although I look forward to all three of these delights. It is my purpose to take a trip through the heart of darkness, and to ponder some of the heaviest thoughts that could trouble a mind; to visit those cemeteries of European Jewry: Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. This is a trip of the utmost important to me, something that I have felt compelled to do for several years. I look forward to completing it and to sharing it with you all.  

Israel and International Opinion

What we are seeing around the world, in response to Israel's Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is an almost perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and selective outrage of the international community. Right next door, there is a civil war of terrifying proportions in Syria that has seeped into Iraq. This past week, in an enormous battle between the Syrian Army and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, now just going by the Islamic State, or IS), more than 700 people were killed over two days. Overall, at least 170,000 people (and frankly, probably closer to 200,000) have died in the course of the Syrian civil war since its inception as peaceful protests in March 2011. Nine million Syrians have been displaced. At least a quarter of tiny Lebanon's population now consists of refugees fleeing the Syrian hellhole. In Iraq, ISIS has captured Mosul, swept down the Euphrates Valley and has marched to the outskirts of Baghdad, looting, destroying, crucifying, and beheading the entire way. ISIS has displayed the heads of people it has massacred on its Twitter page. But who really cares? The world decides to, instead, unleash its opprobrium in a more westerly direction, to that dagger-shaped, New Jersey-sized country on the Mediterranean - Israel. Of course.

Violent, hate-filled protests have broken out in Boston, Los Angeles, Paris, Rotterdam, The Hague, Berlin, Paris, etc. not to mention the capitals of the Middle East. There is certainly a selective outrage toward the "Zionists" (read: "Jews"). When the Assad regime gassed the people of the Ghouta east of Damascus, the world kind of pretended to be mad about it for a week before moving on to domestic politics, LeBron James, or whatever. However, as soon as there is the exchange of gunfire in the West Bank, or an IAF air raid on the Gaza Strip, or, Heaven forfend, an Israeli incursion, the world simply does not have time for anything else. There are rallies, and angry vituperation, and poisonous anti-Semitic invective spewed both orally and via social media. The other, and far bloodier, conflicts in the Middle East simply do not exercise this much passion (among Westerners, that is). This utter obsession with Israel/Palestine is not rational and, to use a word often used in this context (stupidly), disproportionate. If you were to strip Jews from the equation, and moved the location of the fighting to Greenland, no one would care about this conflict. No one. 

The obsession comes from two places: a naive one and a dark one. 

On the naive side: the absurd notion of post-colonialism that the wealthier, stronger (and usually whiter) side is, ipso facto, wrong and evil. The poorer, weaker (and usually darker) side is, ipso facto, correct and good. This ridiculous one-size-fits-all to history is the opposite of helpful, or analytical. There have been times where it has been correct, and there have been times when it has not been. This is what happens when you try to reduce the complexities of history, culture, and society to arbitrary formulae conjured up by academics in Cambridge, New York, Oxford, Paris, or Berkeley. History is not a "science" and certainly not mathematics; so while the laws of physics dictate natural phenomena, there simply is not a comparable framework within which historical progress, or lack thereof, must operate. The one-size-fits-all approach is somehow seen as sophisticated when in fact it is necessarily rigid and close-minded. This approach has dominated academia, and white liberals trying to feel better about themselves adopt pet causes, most predominantly the Palestinian cause. The whole thing would be comical if it were not so deadly serious in consequence. The fact of the matter is that just because Israel is wealthier and more technologically advanced, that does not make it "the aggressor." Just because Hamas is poorer and less technologically advanced (from its own doing), that does not make them noble freedom fighters. Far from it. They stand for everything that the left claims to stand against. And the whole "white-brown" or "white-black" dichotomy collapses in the face of Arabs who could pass for Europeans and Israelis who are of Middle Eastern, African, Persian, Afghan, etc descent. There are black soldiers in the IDF (two of the dead Israeli soldiers in this conflict were black). The whole thing is absurd and wrong. But for the uninformed, it's very easy to see this as a "white-black" thing, both ethically speaking and racially speaking. That's where the moronic college students come into the picture, and they're the ones pushing these rallies in Boston, LA, and Washington, D.C.

On the dark side: anti-Semitism. It is impossible for me to isolate Israel's Jewish nature from the opprobrium it receives from the international community. Not when Bashar al-Assad and ISIS are doing what they are doing right next door, or people are raped and murdered by the thousands in the Congo and Sudan, or when the North Korean government continues its weird Stalinist policies, and we hear very little, proportionally anyway, about it. When the bullets start flying in Gaza or the West Bank, it dominates the world section of newspapers to the detriment of other, bloodier conflicts. It is very sad to say, and I say this as someone who admires Western civilization more than anything, but anti-Semitism is a central feature of Western civilization. The obsession with the Jews has dogged the Westerner, historically speaking, much more than it has the Arab or the Persian. The terminus of this road was the Birkenau gatehouse. There seems to be an ecstatic, cathartic glee that Europeans experience when they get to shout about how the Jews/Zionists/Israelis are murdering babies and committing genocide against the Palestinians. They enjoy it. Because unadulterated anti-Semitism is not acceptable in polite society, it can be cloaked in anti-Zionism, and Europeans can get that Jew-sized elephant off their chests and scream and rant about the Jews doing these evil things. It is, in many ways, the modern version of the blood libel, which is today found most frequently in the Middle East, although in certain circles in Europe and the United States as well.

In sum, Israeli military action brings with it disproportionate (yes, this word is correct in this context) shouting from the rooftops, rage, rallies, and violence. This is not the case with any other conflict. Syrians get exercised about the Syrian civil war, and the murderousness of Bashar al-Assad and ISIS. And they absolutely should, because their country is shattered and hundreds of thousands of their compatriots have been killed. But where are the Westerners at those rallies? Where are the "die-ins" that we saw in Boston? Where are the equivalents of the shouts of "Zionist scum" directed toward Bashar al-Assad or toward ISIS? I haven't heard any of them calling for the slaughter of all Alawites, of whom the Assads are the most prominent representative (nor should they) but I have heard protesters calling for Jews to be sent back to Birkenau. There is a mindless rage toward any Israeli action, which no matter how limited or restrained is "disproportionate" (and, no, this word is not correct in this context). But with the rage comes the deep, sensual pleasure at being able to unload it. 

The Geneva Conference and the Reality of the Syrian Conflict

The peace talks between the Syrian opposition and the Syrian regime in Geneva, Switzerland have failed. This will not be a shock to anyone but the most naive. While some have tried to suggest that the mere fact that the two parties were sitting in the same room was a positive step, the reality was that, even still, the parties dealt with their counterparts via the UN.

There are very serious issues on the ground in Syria. The major players on the rebel "side", the Islamic Front, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and Jabhat al-Nusra (Front of Victory) all refused to attend. The latter two groups are affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic Front and ISIS are actively fighting each other. The rebel "side" is not a side at all - the violent fighting between the different groups suggests that Syria's civil war will be a long-run thing, and that it will continue to leak into Iraq (where al Qaeda flags have waved in Ramadi and Fallujah) and Lebanon, whose politics are intrinsically linked with those of Syria whether it likes it or not. The Syrian National Council withdrew from the Syrian National Coalition, which was "representing" the rebels in Geneva, because it refused to participate in the talks with the regime. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad's forces continue to drop barrel bombs on cities such as Aleppo and Homs, and to besiege the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the southern outskirts of Damascus (dozens of Palestinians have died from starvation due to this siege).

The sectarianism of the conflict has intensified to the point where the Middle East is now defined by the Sunni-Shia split. While historically significant and omnipresent, this split has reached a level of phenomenal violence and obsession of which the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would be proud. While the split was something that motivated Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq, that violence was largely contained within Iraqi borders. This is not the case anymore as Sunnis and Shiites kill each other in Syria, the heart of the Middle East, as well as Iraq and Lebanon. Sunni fighters call their Shiite opponents "majus" (a reference to Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion), "rawafidh" (refusers - the Shiites refuse the legitimacy of the Rashidun Caliphs preceding Ali), and, less historically but more venomously, they call their enemies dogs. Hezbollah is called "Hezb al-Shaytan" (party of Satan), the opposite of Hezbollah's true meaning (party of God), and they call Hassan Nasrallah Nasr al-Lat (al-Lat was a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess). Shiite fighters refer to Sunnis as takfiris (takfir means to call your opponent an apostate, which means death), Wahhabis, and Umayyads (the caliphate reigning from Damascus from 661-750 that is hated virulently by Shiites for their murder of Ali's son Hussein at Karbala in 680, among other reasons). A great analysis on this phenomenon can be found here.

This represents nothing less than an apocalyptic clash within the Islamic world. This is not something that Europeans in expensive suits can fix from their hotel suites overlooking Lake Geneva. There is primordial hatred and fear on display here, of the most vicious kind. Many innocent people, both Sunnis and Shiites of various stripes, are being caught in the middle and will continue to be killed for the foreseeable future. This should not be seen as a black and white struggle because, as mentioned, there is marked infighting between Sunnis on the ground in Syria. ISIS is the most extreme exponent of al Qaeda's ideology (indeed, its leader went beyond the writ of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri when he tried to force Jabhat al-Nusra to merge with his group); Jabhat al-Nusra has tense relations with ISIS because of ISIS' above-mentioned power grab; and the Islamic Front  seeks a Sharia state in Syria. The Islamic Front has kicked ISIS out of many towns over which it had previously held sway, including Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria over which ISIS had ruled since last spring. Islamic Front fighters captured ISIS' headquarters in Aleppo a few weeks ago. As it has been faced with more defeats, ISIS has responded with suicide bombings not only in Syria, but in Lebanon and Iraq as well. These separate states represent, to the radicals of ISIS, one large, united area that needs to belong to Islam - their version of Islam. All of this underscores the danger to the region at large as the Sunni-Shia split, and infighting among Sunnis, spirals out of control.

Ariel Sharon: The Lion of Israel

The name "Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion (ari) of God (El)." It could not have been a more fitting name for Ariel Sharon, who died on Saturday at the age of 85. A tough guy, a brilliant and hard-headed soldier who fought in every Israeli war since 1948, the "Father of the Settlements", the architect of the 1982 war in Lebanon, the fierce counterterrorist, and, ultimately, a politician forced to confront his own principles - this, and so much more, was Ariel Sharon.

Sharon was born to Belorussian immigrants in Kfar Malal, north of Tel Aviv, on February 26, 1928. As a young commander in Israel's War of Independence, Sharon led men in battle several times in 1947 and 1948. He fought in the first (of five) battles for Latrun, a strategically important village. Jewish Jerusalem was besieged and the road from Tel Aviv had to pass through Latrun and other villages inhabited by Arabs. Therefore, the capture of Latrun was necessary to keep the road safe for convoys traveling to Jerusalem. Ultimately, it remained in Jordanian hands and was not part of the Jewish state until 1967. At Latrun, in May 1948 (about two weeks after David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel), Sharon was left for dead before being rescued by a 16-year-old comrade. 

Although later in life Sharon was seen as the star representative of Israel's right wing, he was really, in his own words, a "pragmatic" Zionist as opposed to an "ideological" one: he cared more for the clearing of swamps, the building of houses, the raising of animals, and the planting of olive trees than for high-flying intellectual debate about the nature of Zionism and the Jewish state. When one reads his autobiography, one is struck by his dedication to the professionalization of the military and to doing everything in his power to protect the State of Israel. There is no political philosophizing to be found, very little about his views concerning the intense political debates between the  Revisionists and Mapai in the 1940s (although he does say that he sympathized with and even envied Irgun militants). The settlements needed to be built to protect Israel, and not for any real ideological reason (more on this below). Israel could not depend on anyone else's charming words; it had to depend on itself, its own hard work and ingenuity. Sharon was more of a doer than a thinker, which is not to strike a blow at his intelligence, which was considerable; rather, it is to illustrate the stunning activeness of the man. 

In 1953, Sharon became the leader of Unit 101, a special forces unit within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whose purpose was to conduct raids across the Israeli border in retaliation for attacks by the fedayeen - Palestinian guerrillas who attacked Jewish population centers from bases in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In one such raid on Qibya, in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, dozens of Arab civilians were killed when Israeli soldiers demolished buildings. Sharon would later say that he specifically had his men call into the buildings to make sure no one was in them before setting the charges, but was surprised to discover the next day that 69 Arab civilians had been killed. The raid on Qibya was in retaliation for the murder of a young Jewish mother and her infant children. The killers had infiltrated Israel by way of Qibya. This reprisal was particularly intense because it was intended to be a major deterrent against further fedayeen raids. Instead, however, these forays continued (as did Unit 101's counter-actions) and were ultimately one of the reasons for the Sina Campaign of 1956 (Israel's reasons for fighting that war were: 1) fear of Nasser's new arsenal from the Soviet Union, via the Czech Republic; 2) the fedayeen raids; 3) Egypt's closure of the Straits of Tiran).

During that conflict, Sharon sent a reconnaissance unit into the Mitla Pass, a narrow gorge in the Sinai that was heavily-defended by Egyptian defenders. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. This decision has been heavily criticized to this very day, including by men who fought in the pass, as entirely unnecessary, either from a tactical or strategic point of view. Sharon, for his part, argued that his position at the eastern entrance of the pass was untenable, and he sent the unit into the pass to seek better ground.

Eleven years later, Israel fought in the momentous Six-Day War. Sharon, now a general, made his mark by capturing Egyptian fortifications stretching from Abu Ageila to Um-Shihan in the Sinai Desert. This was a hugely important accomplishment that allowed the Israelis to control the logistical supply routes in Sinai. 

Sharon, already proven a tough, even foolhardy, commander of men, earned his major achievement in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In that conflict, Sharon launched a successful counter-attack against Egyptian armored forces and succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal (infuriating his commander, Shmuel Gonen, who wanted to establish a wider corridor on the east bank of the canal before crossing). In doing so, his forces encircled the Egyptian Third Army, which was only saved by the intervention of the United States: Henry Kissinger wanted to take this opportunity to help "flip" Egypt into the U.S. camp of the Cold War (this was ultimately successful). Sharon's accomplishments in this war, and photographs showing his head wrapped in a white bandage, solidified his image in Israel as a military hero. He was now a living legend of the IDF.

Sharon, up to this point associated with the Labor Party, became a co-founder of the center-right Likud Party with Menachem Begin, for whom he served as Minister of Agriculture and later, controversially, as Minister of Defense. This in and of itself was a revolutionary move, because up to this point, something like 99% of all leading military figures in Israel were Labor Party members. As Minister of Agriculture, Sharon was a leader of the settlement movement. While individual settlements had been established in the environs of Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967 under Labor governments, their number astronomically increased under the patronage of Sharon. Sharon told the settlers to "grab every hilltop" in the West Bank to secure Israel's eastern front against potential aggression from Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestinians. It is clear that his motivations in building and populating the settlements lay in security and "creating facts on the ground" - if Jews lived in the West Bank, the land would essentially become part of Israel, significantly broadening the tiny country's waist with hilly terrain. Israel required the West bank's hilly spine to provide it strategic depth. Sharon, a secular man, was certainly not motivated by a messianic fervor: while he respected the Jewish history of the place, he was not one to go on at length about that history and how it gave the Jews the right to be there. Begin was known to speak at length on this topic, as was, interestingly, the fiercely secular Moshe Dayan. Nonetheless, Sharon was highly regarded by many of the fundamentalist religious settlers, who are motivated by such a messianic fervor, until he led Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

In 1982, Sharon's most controversial moment arose. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been kicked out of Jordan in September 1970 and had succeeded in creating a state within a state in southern Lebanon. PLO fighters launched rockets at towns and villages in Galilee. Using the pretext of the assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador to Great Britain in June 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon, pushing through the south of that country beyond the Litani River and, ultimately, besieging Beirut. Many speculate that Sharon had kept Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the dark as to his intentions in Lebanon which were, essentially:

1. Destroy the PLO in Lebanon
2. Change the balance of power within the chaotic Lebanese political environment so that the Maronite Christians would take control of the country and, following that, sign a peace treaty with Israel.

While the first goal was achieved, the second goal was hugely ambitious and came to naught. In September 1982, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon's president-elect, a Maronite Christian, and the head of the Phalange group in Lebanon, was assassinated. In retaliation, Elie Hobeika, one of Gemayel's commanders, sent some of his troops into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in West Beirut. The consequences were horrifying: several hundreds of Palestinians, men, women, and children, were slaughtered. An Israeli inquiry later found that, although Sharon was not directly responsible for the massacre, he did allow the Phalangists into the camp and he should have been aware of what would have happened to the Palestinians there. Sharon initially refused to resign from his post, but eventually did so in 1983. This essentially cast a shadow over Sharon for the next two decades - while he served in the Shamir and Netanyahu governments, he was decidedly not in the limelight and was ultimately never able to attain his mission: to become the IDF Chief of Staff. This is the major reason why Sharon is, to this day, considered the main "Israeli butcher" by Palestinians, Lebanese, and many anti-Israel activists and thinkers around the world. TIME magazine even accused him of actively perpetrating the massacre, for which Sharon sued the publication for libel.

In September 2000, Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. He did not enter any of the buildings of the complex. Immediately afterward, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper exploded in the Second Intifada (or "Al Aqsa" Intifada because of Sharon's perceived slight of that Muslim holy site). While at the time many viewed Sharon's visit as needlessly provocative, and considered it the immediate cause of the Second Intifada, it has since come to light that the uprising and terror campaign was something that Yasser Arafat and the head honchos of the PLO had been planning for several months. Sharon's visit was simply a convenient pretext and alibi.

After a rash of suicide bombings in Israel, the country's frustrated and frightened electorate brought Sharon to the premiership in March 2001. While certainly controversial, he was also seen as a man who could be trusted to protect his country. In Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF successfully crushed terrorist centers throughout the West Bank. Also controversially (although not in Israel, where Sharon's hands were forced), it was under Sharon that construction of the West Bank barrier began. It should be noted that the idea of separation between Israel and the Palestinians had originally been a Labor idea, and had been explicitly urged by Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Sharon and others in Likud were opposed to the idea of separation because it implied that Israel did not have sovereignty over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews were just as entitled to live in Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, and Efrat as they were to live in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Netanya. Sharon and others on the right wing of the spectrum did not want to build a barrier because they felt that, in doing so, it would become the de facto border between Israel and the future state of Palestine - and they did not want this to happen, given the reasons mentioned above. However, under relentless public pressure (over 90 percent), Sharon agreed to the construction of the separation barrier. This barrier has been castigated as an "apartheid wall" since its inception, and has been a stick with which to beat the state of Israel. But it is undoubtedly true, as statistics illustrate, that the barrier has been effective in preventing suicide bombings in Israel. The vast majority of suicide bombers, prior to its construction, had originated in the West Bank, easily infiltrated into Israel proper, and then exploded themselves in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The barrier put a stop to all that.

In 2005, Sharon made another decision that caused him to go against long-held principles: namely, the decision to remove not only the IDF, but Israeli civilians, from their homes in Gaza (and four small settlements in the northern West Bank). For the "Father of the Settlements," this assuredly could not have been easy. Because Sharon did not trust his Palestinian interlocutors one whit, and felt that there was no true partner for peace, this move was made entirely unilaterally. He argued that in the final analysis, this meant that Gaza would be under Palestinian sovereignty, so that if rockets continued to be fired into Israel, the IDF would be able to declare war against another sovereign entity and not be seen to be oppressing a subject people. This, however, did not, and does not, prevent many individuals from claiming that Gaza is still, de facto, occupied because it is under siege by Israel. Many settlers and their supporters were concerned that the Gaza disengagement was but a dress rehearsal for withdrawal from the West Bank, which would have involved many more people and many more financial resources. It would be even more difficult emotionally because it is the West Bank, not Gaza (or anywhere in Israel's heavily populated coastal plain) that is the cradle and heart of Jewish civilization. Hebron and Bethel are important locations in the Tanakh, not Ashdod and Hod HaSharon. Ultimately, Sharon bolted Likud and formed a new centrist party, Kadima, whose members supported his push for disengagement.

We will never know the full extent of Sharon's intentions because he suffered a stroke in December 2005 and then a massive follow-up stroke in January 2006, which left him in a vegetative state until his death this past Saturday. But it was the disengagement that made Sharon at least somewhat respectable again in international discourse. It helped to rehabilitate his image as a brutal war criminal, at least in Western eyes (many Arabs, on the other hand, celebrated his death by handing out sweets). I don't necessarily think that it was a 180 degree turn. Sharon was a man dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and he did what he thought he had to do to make that happen. Not trusting his Palestinian counterparts, yet tired of having to protect small Jewish settlements amidst a hostile population, he decided on unilateral disengagement. The intifada proved to him that there could be no peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and, therefore, that Israel's presence in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, was untenable. For this, the settler movement now holds Sharon in considerable contempt - one MK of Jewish Home recently said that it had been the will of God that Sharon went into a coma when he did so that he did not give up the West Bank.

Sharon was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life personality whose nickname "The Bulldozer" was decidedly apropos. When he thought something needed to be done, he did it, even if it meant circumventing orders in the 1956 and 1973 wars, deceiving his own prime minister in 1982 (as many contend), or undoing what he had built up with his own hands (namely, the settlements). He stood up for what he believed in, even in the face of the severest criticism, whether it came from the right or left. He was known to get in fierce debates with his superiors and peers in the IDF, including Dayan, Gonen, Chaim Bar-Lev, Yigal Allon, and David Elazar. He was truly a maverick. Ultimately, Sharon's legacy is that he was, first and foremost, a fierce protector of the Jewish state. He was the shield that absorbed the blows. He loved the people and the land. He did not mince words about his hatred for Israel's enemies and he did what he could to utterly crush them. These principles informed his controversial decisions to build settlements and invade Lebanon up to Beirut. He was not a warmonger: he said once in an interview with The New Yorker that he would much rather labor at his farm than fight Israel's neighbors. While undoubtedly a roughhewn, brusque man, he was, according to many accounts, very charming as well - a perfect example of the legendary Israeli sabra. He was, indeed, the Lion of Israel and lived up to the name "Ariel."