On the Nature of anti-Semitism

When commentators write about the evils of prejudice and bigotry, they often conflate the evils of racism and anti-Semitism. While the two superficially resemble one another, they are not the same thing. There are key distinctions.

Racism is the belief that different groups of peoples have different biological characteristics that explain not only their outward appearance, but their individual and collective behavior and that, because of this, different races are necessarily superior to others. This belief is held by the Ku Klux Klans, neo-Nazis, and Black Muslims of the world, among many, many other groups. The act of an individual is not reflective of his or her individuality, but rather of his or her entire race. If a black man holds up a corner store, what would you expect? After all, he and all other black people are just “thugs.” Racists have an irrational, anxious fear, even hatred, of other races and manifest it through disdain, poisonous language, and even physical violence. The fever-brained fantasies of the KKK, with knuckle-dragging, sex-obsessed black men lusting after and seducing young white girls, is a very prominent example of such thought processes. The practices of Jim Crow and Apartheid South Africa are demonstrations of such a thought structure at the state level. Blacks were not just different, they were simply intolerable to be around and to share with, and certainly could not mix with good white folk.

Anti-Semitism is similar to racism, but it branches off from your “garden variety” racism rather quickly. Yes, the Jews are different; yes, they are scheming after white girls too; yes, we hate them; and, yes, we are superior to them. But there is something altogether different about anti-Semitism as a phenomenon. The conspiracism exhibited by anti-Semites is breathtaking. It’s not just that Jews are different, and that one cannot trust them: it is that they control finance, and the media, and the government. They have a stranglehold on our very society. Capitol Hill is “Zionist-controlled” territory. The Jews are capitalists and they are communists; they do not assimilate enough and yet they assimilate too much; and so on.

The rabid anti-Semites don’t just believe that Israel illegally kills Palestinians and steals their lands, or hold Israel to an absurd double standard expected of no other nation (although they do); they believe that Israel harvests the organs of Palestinians, that they poison wells and hand out chewing gum that causes AIDs or cancer, that they created ISIS to cause havoc in the Middle East and distract everyone from their perfidious occupation, and that Jews in Israel and worldwide find Gentile blood simply delicious and irreplaceable for their Passover matzo. The Jews fake the Holocaust in a grand swindle to steal land from the Palestinians and form a state on their broken backs, or to demonize Europe and Christians, or to demand that countries unjustly give them compensation, because Jews are the ultimate swindlers. So literally the most- and best-documented atrocity in the history of mankind is shooed away as a hoax. “The Holohoax never happened. The gas chambers in Auschwitz were for lice. The crematoria were for sick prisoners. Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were just transit camps. The Anne Frank diary is a forgery, complete bullshit. Where is the Führer order?!” Yes, these Neanderthals are among us. They are so clouded by their anti-Semitic hatred that they are unwilling or unable to accept the truth that is right in front of them.

The conflation of Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews with that toward other groups never ceases to frustrate me. They are not different in degree, but different in kind. Hitler did not just hate the Jews, or hold them in contempt, the way that he did for Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the other groups that his regime persecuted and murdered. Hitler was, obviously, a fervent racist who believed firmly in a hierarchy of different races. The Aryan was at the very top, then the Latin, the Slav, all the way down to the Jew. Hitler certainly was furious that Jesse Owens won his contests in the 1936 Olympics. But the Jews were not just an inferior race: they were bacilli that needed to be removed from society, either via quarantine or extermination. The Jews were hated, but they were also feared.

They were feared because Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and the rest legitimately believed in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that, based in London, New York, and Moscow, would throttle the German race and nation out of existence. The Jews were not really an inferior race; rather, they were an enemy that deserved a sort of inverted respect. Jews were wily and insidious, and Germany did not just have to be on its guard; it had to slaughter them. All of them. The women, the children, the elderly. Speaking to Wehrmacht generals in June 1944, Himmler said (and this is worth quoting at length for the insight it gives into the Nazi mindset):

           

It was necessary to resolve another question. It was the most horrible task and the most awful assignment that any organization could receive: the solution of the Jewish question. I want to say a few words on the matter to this group with complete candor. It’s good that we had the hardness to exterminate the Jews in our territory. Don’t ask yourselves how difficult it would have been to carry out such an order, even though, as soldiers, I might say you would understand. But thinking critically as German soldiers, you can see that the order was  essential. Because we wouldn’t have been able to withstand the aerial bombings if we had had the Jews in our cities. I am also convinced we would not have been able to hold the Lemberg front of the Generalgouvernement if the big ghettos in Lemberg, Krakau, Lublin, and Warsaw had still been there. We cleaned out the last one, the big ghetto in Warsaw, in summer 1943. In Warsaw there were 500,000 Jews [note: not by summer 1943 there weren’t]. I tell you this number confidentially. It took us five weeks of street fighting.  Just the same, I want to answer a little question that surely you must have. The question is, of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you do the same to the women and the children? So I have to tell you something: The children will be grown one day. Do we want to be so improper that we say, no, no, we’re too weak to kill children. Our children can deal with them. Our children will fight that one out. But the Jewish hate, small today, will be big tomorrow, and the grown avengers will attack our children and grandchildren, who will then have to deal with them. I am convinced that this will be the case even if Adolf Hitler does not survive. No, we cannot shirk our responsibility to kill all the Jews. That would have been cowardly and therefore we adopted a clear solution to the problem, as difficult as it was.

Hitler, Himmler, and the Nazis were not about separating themselves from (and ultimately killing) the Jews because the Jews were filthy or because they were held in outstanding contempt for their different appearances. These are true, and necessary elements, but not sufficient. The Jews’ nefarious influence and their modernizing, liberal, communistic, humanistic, urbanizing ways had to be ended, full stop. At first the Nazis were content with deporting the Jews to get them away. Ultimately, they determined that the Jews had to die. 

The Nazis viewed the Final Solution not as the mass murder of innocent people, but as a war against an enemy in which mercifulness would be madness. The Jews were not just the ones being lined up at the edge of ditches or shoved into the gas chambers: they were the ones controlling American, British, and Soviet policy and thus fighting a world war against Germany and National Socialism. Hitler hesitated to deport the Jews of Germany before September 1941 not only because he was concerned about domestic opinion (although this was very important in his considerations), but because he wanted to hold them hostages to dissuade the United States from entering the war. Hitler, in all seriousness (and he was not alone in the Nazi leadership in thinking this), believed that the United States, being under the influence of Jews, would not enter the war against him because he would be in a position of committing violence against their German brethren. At the end of the war, before a meeting with Norbert Masur, a representative from the World Jewish Congress, in April 1945 (when he was frantically trying to burnish his image to evade the hangman) Himmler told his masseur Felix Kersten, “I want to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews.” As if the Nazis and the Jews were the Sharks and the Jets, or the Hatfields and McCoys, or, more accurately, two warring nations that needed to both lay down their arms for the good of both sides.

The war against the Soviet Union was seen as a war against Judeo-Bolshevism, the construct in the Nazi imagination in which cunning Jews centered in Moscow held a firm grip on the Slavs of the Soviet Union, who were too stupid to realize they were doing the Jews’ bidding. Notice the difference. Hitler’s view toward the Slavs was racist, it was contemptuous; but the anti-Semitism was another thing entirely. In the words of historian Richard J. Evans, “The Slavs, in the end, were for the Nazis a regional obstacle to be removed; the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ to be ground into the dust.”  Hitler needed to crush Poland to get at the Great Jew beyond, lying in wait in Moscow; but while he was at it, the Jews in Poland and elsewhere would be slaughtered. If he could not successfully conquer the Soviet Union, this was at least a victory of sorts.

The Nazis had horrific things planned for the peoples of Eastern Europe, who would have been shot, starved, and deported in the tens of millions; some 31 million were slated to die to make way for German colonists. But they did not plan this because the Poles, Ukrainians, or Belarusians kept them up at night; they did it because they wanted their land, and because they had the dismissive feelings toward them that one has toward cockroaches and spiders. You exterminate them, but you do not do so out of hatred. Poland was to be utterly destroyed as a nation for daring to step up to Hitler in the months of 1939 leading up to September – before this, Hitler regarded the Poles with relative indifference. The intellectuals had to be murdered en masse, not because the Nazis necessarily feared them, but because they were the lifeblood of Polish leadership. In this racist practicality, it made sense for them to go. But for the Jews, it did not matter if they were intellectuals or dullards, rich or poor, young or old, healthy or sick, skilled or unskilled – they all had to go: to the Lublin district or to Madagascar, or, finally (and in reality, not in flights of fancy), to the pits and to the ash ponds.

Anti-Semitism is more similar to the language characterizing ethnic disputes than that of, say, American racism, which is more colored by sneering disdain and a false sense of superiority. The Serbs, Croats, and Albanians; the Hutus and Tutsis; the Pakistanis and the Indians; the Greeks and the Turks: the horrific bloodletting between these groupings has involved caricatures of the “other” that are also conspiratorial and contain some of the elements of Nazi anti-Semitism above. The difference, however, is that these disputes are limited in space and time. They are usually over a patch of land. The Jews, however, are hated by many peoples, in many times, and in many places, in a way that is simply not comparable with any other group. The Hamas fighter, the left-wing British academic, the right-wing Ukrainian nationalist, and the passionate upholder of chavismo in Venezuela can all agree on at least one thing: the Jew (or “Zionist”) is an antagonist who can bend the media, and even the global powers, to his whim. So the Iranian regime, which has no border dispute with Israel and is in fact hundreds of miles away, uses the most brutal of language toward Israel and threatens to destroy that nation. This rationally makes no sense. And while both Arabs and Iranians can be brutally racist toward other ethnic groups (and toward each other), they can always agree on the fact that the Jews are the handmaidens of Empire and the malevolent actor of world history.

The language of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and Iran is redolent with anti-Semitic imagery – Israelis and Jews are octopi, spiders, and murderers of children who seek to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and subjugate Muslims to their will. The Jews are not just a hated enemy fighting to hang on to a piece of land: they are something far, far more sinister, Satanic and cosmic than that. This is not saying Jews are dumb, or inferior, or some other dismissive caricature: it is saying that the Jew is the world enemy and the poisoner of all peoples.

The Jew is everything for everyone: a Christ-killer, a rootless cosmopolitan, a Bolshevik, a ruthless exploitative capitalist, a fascist, a radical secularist, a mindless traditionalist, a puppet-master, a well-poisoner, a liar, a swindler, a bigot, and a seducer. It is the obsessiveness and the universalism of anti-Semitism that makes it a hatred apart.

The Warsaw Uprising

On August 1, 1944 the Polish resistance, led by the Armia Krajowa (AK, or Home Army) launched an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. What followed was 63 days of urban warfare characterized by an intensity, according to eyewitnesses, similar to that of Stalingrad about two years before. The powstanie warszawskie led to the deaths of 150,000-200,000 civilians and tens of thousand of combatants. The Germans rampaged in a berserk frenzy while the Soviets dithered on the other side of the Vistula River. The uprising concluded in a Polish defeat. While a point of great national pride, it remains a topic of fierce debate in Poland to this very day.

To mark the 60^th anniversary of the uprising, Poland announced the opening of the Warsaw Uprising Museum on July 31, 2004. The museum is both supremely moving and super-modern, including a short 3-D film called Miasto Ruin (“City of Ruins”) that shows a digital reconstruction of the devastation the city experienced during the Second World War. The museum is located, fittingly enough, in the Wola neighborhood, where the Nazis committed the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people in a matter of days (to be discussed in more detail below). When I was taking a walking tour of Warsaw, my guide recommended the museum to my fellow tourists and me, although she added a caveat that the museum was, in her opinion, too triumphal about the uprising. In her mind, she explained carefully, the rising should not have occurred at all.

This jived uncomfortably with posters and signs everywhere dedicated to, when I was visiting, the 70^th anniversary of this iconic event. Graffiti of the logo of the AK – an anchor (in Polish, Kotwica) formed out of the letters “P” and “W”, which stand for Polska Walcząca (“Fighting Poland”)– was to be found throughout the city, including on the walls of alleys and under street bridges. A huge commemorative barricade sat on Nowy Świat (or perhaps the street was at that point Krakowskie Przedmieście, which Nowy Świat becomes as one walks north up the Royal Route), as a reminder of the sacrifices made not only by members of the AK, but by civilians, who overturned tram cars and used everything they could get their hands on to serve as barricades against the Germans. This would not have sit well with my interlocutor on the tour. A young woman, likely in her late 20s, she expressed her unease at the triumphalism with which the uprising is remembered. This is understandable: is the death of up to 200,000 civilians and the near-total destruction of a major city ever justifiable, even upon the altar of national dignity? To which a graffiti artist of the Kotwica might retort: “Our honor as Poles depended upon rising up against the Germans to show that we were a people willing to give our all for our capital city. We needed to show the world that we had fought and died for our country so that it could remain ours.” This, crudely, sums up the debate over the powstanie.

The Red Army captured several Polish cities in quick succession in the summer of 1944: Wilno on July 13, Lublin on July 23, Brześć on July 26, and Lwów on July 27. When arriving in Lublin, the Soviets set up the Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (PKWN, or Polish Committee of National Liberation – known informally to history as the Lublin Committee) – a puppet regime of non-representative Polish Communists, the majority of whom had spent the war not in Poland under the Nazi jackboot, but in Moscow in service of the Soviet regime. The Soviets intended the PKWN to govern Poland rather than the Polish government-in-exile, which operated from London. Stalin and the Soviet government considered the government-in-exile, as they viewed all Poles, as bourgeois, if not outright fascist, agents in thrall to capitalist influence.

For a brief historical recap: in August 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow and signed a nonaggression treaty. According to its terms, the countries would not interfere with each other’s conquests. In a secret annex, it was agreed that they would split the territories in between them (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine) into respective spheres of influence. Poland as far east as the Bug River would be German; east of that territory would be Soviet. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the Soviets followed on September 17. The Soviets, viewing the Poles and especially their officers as a reactionary body, sought to decapitate this class. In April and May 1940, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, shot some 22,000 Polish officers, including at Katyń. In June 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, putting an end to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviets and the Poles began a queasy alliance of sorts, but when the Poles would inquire as to the fate of these officers, Stalin would put them off with excuses. In April 1943, the Germans discovered a mass grave at Katyń outside of Smolensk in the Soviet Union. While the Soviets insisted that it was in fact a German atrocity (certainly not hard to believe given German murderousness), the Poles suspected otherwise; in this tense time, the Soviets abruptly cut off their diplomatic relations with Poland. The Western Allies, shamefully, demanded that the Poles swallow their pride and accept the Soviet explanation. 

This episode sets the stage for the Warsaw Uprising. Before June 1944, when the Soviets were approaching Polish territory, Polish politicians and military officers debated the best course of action upon a German retreat. The consensus was that, should diplomatic relations be restored, the AK soldiers would reveal themselves to the Red Army; otherwise, they would remain hidden and await further notice. The commander-in-chief of the AK, Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was opposed to an uprising unless if the following held: the Allies had expressed their support for the Polish position regarding Poland’s eastern frontier; the Western Allies were on the German doorstep; and the Nazi government was on the verge of collapse. None of these was remotely the case as the Soviets approached Polish soil – the Western Allies had not even landed on the Normandy beaches. Sosnkowski’s deputy, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, was strongly in favor of an uprising. His plan, Operation Tempest (Akcja Burza), called for rolling uprisings that would occur as the Germans were retreating and as the Soviets were approaching. The AK would fight the Germans as they fled westward and join up with the Soviets, having the knowledge and dignity of having liberated their cities themselves.

The first operation of Burza was near Kowel (now in western Ukraine) – the AK fought the Wehrmacht and then linked up with the Soviets. While the Poles did not know it, the Kremlin had passed down an order in November 1943 that, when the Red Army encountered the AK, it was to disarm AK fighters and execute anyone who refused to give up his weapons. This happened to the Polish fighters of the AK in Kowel and Lwów – they fought the Nazis only to be humiliatingly disarmed, or murdered, by the Soviets.

The Soviets advanced toward the Vistula and there were rumors that they were close to entering Warsaw. On July 27, the German governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, ordered 100,000 Polish men and women to report for duty to begin constructing defensive fortifications. Much to their credit, few Poles showed up. In the face of the Soviet onslaught, the Germans didn’t bother to enforce their order and Fischer fled westward (he was later hanged for war crimes at Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison). Soviet tanks were spotted east of Praga, Warsaw’s easternmost district. This convinced the head of the AK in Warsaw, Antoni Chruściel, that an uprising was necessary (he had previously been against the idea). The main purpose was to have shown that they had fought the Germans, liberated their capital city themselves, and were therefore able to rule themselves in a postwar world.

And so the uprising began on August 1, 1944. The Germans responded with utter ferocity. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler passed down orders that “Warsaw was to be wiped from the face of the earth, all of the inhabitants were to be killed, there were to be no prisoners.” Himmler appointed one of his most trusted men, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, as head of the German troops in Warsaw. Bach-Zelewski's expertise lay in the wholesale slaughter of men,  women, and children, mostly Jews, in "anti-partisan" actions in Belarus. Under his command served Bronislaw Kaminski, a Russian turncoat, and Oskar Dirlewanger, a child molester and necrophiliac who led a motley crew of criminals known as the Dirlewanger Brigade. This unit committed atrocities of the utmost savagery in Warsaw. 

The initial objective of the Polish resistance (led by the AK and including fighters ranging from Communists, who were few, to the nationalist right, who were many, and everything in between, including Jews of all ideological stripes who had survived the Ghetto) was to secure main east-west roads in the city and bridges over the Vistula, as well as to capture the major districts of the city, including the Old Town, the city center, and other areas. The Poles faced an onslaught of Germans who fought without mercy.

Between August 5-12, the Germans entered the Wola neighborhood as they pushed west to east toward Warsaw’s city center. There, they interpreted Hitler and Himmler’s orders quite literally. They went house to house and murdered everyone they found, regardless of age or sex. Heinz Reinefarth, a German commander in Wola, later estimated that 10,000 civilians were murdered on August 5 alone. The Germans used human shields as they advanced, making Polish civilians walk in front of them and having Polish women sit atop their tanks. During this German rampage in Wola, some 40,000-50,000 civilians were killed. Later, the Germans impressed Polish civilians in the so-called Verbrennungskommando Warschau, where they were forced to recover the victims’ bodies and burn them.

The Polish resistance fought bravely, but were cut off from food and supplies of weapons and ammunition, and had to rely upon the Allies for assistance. The AK only counted on the uprising lasting for a few days and did not have the supplies necessary for such a long battle. The inter-Allied politics of the moment ultimately greased the way for the elimination of the Warsaw Uprising. The Soviets were the obvious Allied power in the territory proximate to Warsaw. However, they were only able to capture Praga from the Germans on September 11, about 40 days after the uprising began. While it is undeniable that the Red Army was exhausted and a rest at the Vistula was necessary, what is also undeniable is that the Soviets were not too sad about seeing the destruction of the AK. The Nazis were, in many ways, doing the dirty work for them. The AK and other resistance groups would certainly have become the seed of any future anti-Communist resistance in Poland.

Churchill was adamant about supporting the Polish fighters in Warsaw. The British, South Africans, and Poles based in Italy flew air sorties and dropped food, ammunition, and weapons. The Soviets, however, would not allow the planes to refuel at their air bases, meaning that the pilots had to make a perilous journey from Bari and Brindisi, Italy to Warsaw and then back without stopping. Many of them were shot down by the Germans on their way to or from Warsaw. When Churchill pressed Roosevelt to help him in trying to convince Stalin to allow them the use of Soviet airbases, Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long range general war prospect for me to join with you in the proposed message.” The Soviets had spilled the most blood in defeating the Nazi enemy, fighting tenaciously in the streets of Stalingrad and the fields of Kursk, and it would not do to ruffle their feathers. In essence, Poland, for whom the Allies had gone to war in 1939 (and whose men had fought beside the Western Allies in the skies above Britain, at Monte Cassino, and on the beaches of Normandy, among other places), was sacrificed to placate Stalin (and, to be fair, in recognition of the geopolitical situation). While the Soviets had excuses before they reached the east bank of the Vistula in mid-September, these wore thin and they agreed to make airdrops to the Polish fighters beginning on September 13. Their fighters had to fly low so as to be accurate in dropping supplies to the increasingly small areas that the Poles controlled in Warsaw; unfortunately, this being the case (plus a lack of parachutes), many of the supplies that were dropped were destroyed upon landing. When the Soviets finally allowed the U.S. to use its air base in Poltava, U.S. pilots proceeded to carry out airdrops over Warsaw, only to accidentally drop the vast majority of the supplies in German hands.

The combination of overpowering German firepower and the lack of food and supplies thinned the areas under Polish control. In mid-September, after the beginning of Soviet airdrops, the 1^st Polish Army under Zygmunt Berling, fighting under Soviet command, attempted to cross westward over the Vistula to link up with the AK. In the face of heavy German fire, only a few made it to the west bank, and these had to retreat back eastward after a short while. The Poles were squeezed in the areas of the Old City and Mokotów. Reading the writing on the wall, the Poles of the Old City escaped the Germans through the sewer system (indeed, the image of Polish fighters emerging from manholes became an icon of the uprising – one of the sculptures at the Warsaw Uprising memorial depicts such a scene).

Bór-Komorowski was eventually forced to surrender to Bach-Zelewski on October 2. The Polish general demanded that the AK be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention – that is, to be treated properly as prisoners of war, something that could not be taken for granted when it came to the Nazis. The Germans agreed, and they also allowed the civilian population to leave the city. The civilians were evacuated to a transit camp at Pruszków, whence tens of thousands were shipped as foreign laborers to Germany and thousands more to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

Meanwhile, the Soviets treated the Polish resistance fighters as they had been treating the AK throughout Poland. They forcibly disarmed them and arrested them as fascist agents and Nazi collaborators. Sixteen high-ranking AK officers were arrested and put on a show trial in March 1945 in the so-called Trial of the Sixteen. Thousands of AK members wound up in the Soviet Gulag and many were never to see their native Poland again. Meanwhile, at the Yalta Conference, the Allies agreed to Stalin’s demand that the Soviets retain all of the Polish land they had acquired in 1939 – that is, in their agreement reached with Nazi Germany. The Poles were to receive territorial compensation at the expense of Germany in the west, which is why formerly German cities such as Breslau and Stettin are today the Polish cities of Wrocław and Szczecin.

Was it worth it? The Poles continue to debate the uprising 70 years later. Certainly a majority see it as a heroic fight against tyranny that proved to the world Polish valor and self-respect. The blood of the martyred gave the Polish people a collective identity and pride that allowed them to stand strong in the face of the Communist tyranny to come. Bór-Komorowski insisted upon the uprising's rightness until the end of his days. But there is a large body of those who believe, like my tour guide, that it was not worth it. After all, the Germans subjected the Poles to a mass slaughter. After the battle, German Verbrennungs und Vernichtungskommandos (Burning and Destruction Detachments) systematically set about destroying the Polish capital. 85-90% of the city was laid waste. This was to go toward fulfilling Heinrich Himmler’s order of October 17: “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transit station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” 

Was such epic destruction worth it? After all, the Soviets sat on their hands, with a few exceptions, as the Germans went about doing their dirty business. While the purpose of the uprising was to prove that the Poles had earned the right to rule themselves, the Soviets picked up where the Germans left off and subjected the people of Warsaw, and of Poland, to 45 years of oppression and misery. The Polish resistance was not as lucky as the French resistance, which rose up in Paris and was able to link up with the Western allies and get their country back. The Polish leadership, including Bór-Komorowski, knew the Soviet policy of disarming, arresting, and even executing AK fighters elsewhere in Poland - why would Warsaw be different? Perhaps it would have been better if the Poles had put down their arms and passively accepted the Soviets, if grudgingly, so as to spare the bloodletting? 

While my sympathies lie with the artists of the Kotwica, it is not for me, a non-Pole who is removed in time, space and identity from these events, to decide whether or not the cost was worth it. But it is an eye opening, thought-provoking tragedy that makes one question the Manichaean Good-Evil lens through which we often view the Second World War.

Nazi Ideology, Operation Barbarossa, and the Holocaust

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union. Nearly four million Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and others poured over the Soviet frontier in the largest invasion in history. This was the moment: in many ways, it marks the culmination of the Nazi ideal in that it represented the physical manifestation of Hitler’s wildest dreams. The invasion was inextricably tied up with the Nazi leader’s views toward the Jews, toward the notion of Lebensraum, and the National Socialist utopian vision. So when people say, “If only Hitler hadn’t invaded Russia, the Germans could have won World War II,” they reveal that they do not understand the real reasons for the Second World War in Europe.

Nazi Germany wanted a reckoning with France for revanchist and vindictive reasons, and because it wanted to dominate continental Europe. Its reasons for wanting to do so were ideological and economic. Ideologically, the Nazis believed firmly that the Germans were racially superior to all other human beings, and that by right, they therefore had the right to be lords over them. The Slavs were dumb, the Latins lazy and decadent, the Jews cunning and evil. The British were highly respected and seen as racial equals (“cousins”, if you will), but Hitler foresaw a world where Germany would dominate the continent and Britain the seas. This may be why Hitler did not destroy the British armies as they evacuated from Dunkirk to the British Isles in May-June 1940. Hitler did not want to destroy the British Empire, and in an interesting way, his moment for the timing of the Soviet invasion and his strategic logic was partially a desire to impress the British such that they would have to come to terms with him.

Economically, Hitler and the Nazis believed in autarchy, an economic system in which a nation is self-sufficient and therefore has no need to trade with anyone. Hitler had a searing memory of the First World War and of the Allies’ economic blockade and chokehold over Germany. He would not allow this to happen again. He would knock out France and the Low Countries to establish dominance, but also to secure his rear flank for the real war, the war that he had wanted to fight since he had become politically conscious: the war against the Soviet Union, against what was, in Hitler’s mind, Judeo-Bolshevism. The Germans had come to a tactical agreement with the Soviets in 1939 so that they could invade Poland and avoid a two front war. That was successful (although not quite, as Hitler did not really think France and Britain would call his bluff) but Poland itself was but a jumping off point for the endless wheat fields of the Ukraine. Germany would never starve again, as it would control the breadbasket of Europe. Tying back in with the ideology, it would be done on the backs of tens of millions of slaving and starving Slavs. As for the Jews, they would be taken care of in a hazy “Final Solution” somewhere to the “East”.

It is very important to emphasize that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was not just a “war.” It was to be exterminatory and genocidal by its very intent. It was to fulfill a colonialist, utopian dream that burned brightly in the minds of Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Darré. Its purpose was not just the acquisition of territory but the complete and utter destruction of the enemy: it was a fight to the death. In some ways, then, to the Nazis, this was a holy war. A master plan was drawn up, called Generalplan Ost, which foresaw the extermination, enslavement, and mass deportation of the Slavs. German “warrior-farmers” (the fictional being that made Himmler’s heart aflutter like nothing else) and their families would replace them. 

As a preliminary step to Generalplan Ost, the Nazis, specifically Dr. Herbert Backe, drew up the Hungerplan, which foresaw the systematic starvation of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Food would be stripped from the citizens and given first to the German occupiers, and then to Germans back home. Naturally, the Jews would only get whatever was left after everyone else had their share, if anything. All of this was meant to forestall another instance of the deprivation experienced by the German population during the First World War, which Hitler and the Nazis believed had sapped the Germans of their national feeling and lured them into Communism and, ultimately, to the Dolchstoss. Backe wrote, “If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.” Millions did indeed starve to death in the years 1941-44, when the area was under German occupation, although thankfully not in the kind of numbers Backe, Hermann Göring, and others envisaged. 

The invasion of the Soviet Union is inextricably wound up with the history of the extermination of the Jews. The Holocaust, as it is now known, did not begin in earnest until the summer of 1941 and in the western lands of the Soviet Union. Ghettos had been established in Poland, most famously in Lodz and Warsaw, in 1940, and Jews were marked with Stars of David as well. Jews were certainly shot out of hand and humiliated by military, civilian, and SS personnel. Nonetheless, there is a marked distinction between even the cruelest of humiliations and segregation and outright mass slaughter.  The latter is what the Germans embarked upon in the formerly Soviet territories.

The Germans had a policy of provoking pogroms from behind the scenes, but this of course could not have been a successful policy absent a murderous anti-Semitism among the populations. A toxic breed of primordial distrust and hatred, jealousy, greed, and fear of the stereotypical, and largely ahistorical, bogeyman of Zydokomuna (Jewish Communism) led natives of these lands to partake in massacres. They were largely steered form behind the scenes by the Germans and by nationalists who had fled and established contact with the Germans after the Soviets had invaded in 1939. In Kaunas, Lithuania, just days after the invasion, thousands of Jews were murdered. In one particular instance, at the Lietukis Garage, one young man, known to history as the “Death Dealer of Kaunas,” beat dozens of Jews to death with an iron pipe, clambered atop their corpses, and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. In Lvov, around the same time, thousands of Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, who were furious upon discovering that thousands of their fellow citizens had been murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. In many of their eyes, Jews and Communists were one: some of the most prominent of the Communist leaders were Jews. This was not an accidental policy of the Communist Party, which sought a policy of divide and conquer by placing Jews in such roles. Indeed, these scenes got so out of control that the obsessive Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, urged his local commanders to rein in the mob and proceed in a more "orderly" fashion. 

Heydrich's men, the Einsatzgruppen, were mobile killing squads. There were four: from north to south, they were named A through D. They moved behind the Wehrmacht as it exploded through the Western territories of the Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941. The Einsatzgruppen were specifically trained in ideological rigor and “toughness,” the latter in the Nazi idiom signifying utter indifference to murder and mass death. They were assisted in their mass shooting by police battalions (including Police Battalion 101, the focus of an inestimable analysis in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men); non-German auxiliary forces (including Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Romanians); the Wehrmacht; and, most ominously, SS units set up by Heinrich Himmler under his personal acolytes Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (in command of the SS Cavalry Brigade) and Friedrich Jeckeln (head of the 1^st SS Brigade).

These mass killings were first centered on Jewish men. Heydrich’s instructions for the Einsatzgruppen included the execution of middle- and senior-ranking Communist functionaries and political commissars, as well as Jews in party and government positions. Because of the ideological training of not only the specially trained killing squads but of the military, Jews and Bolsheviks were essentially seen as identical entities. “Jews in party and government positions,” then, meant essentially all Jewish men of military age, and they were therefore to be shot. Soviet prisoners of war were treated barbarously, with 3.3 million out of 5.7 million dying during the war, many of outright starvation. The Jews among them were taken from among their comrades and executed without question. (Here it should be briefly noted: The Wehrmacht itself was largely ideologically motivated to carry out the most murderous of deeds, and also took part in the murder of the Jews in a significant way. The army high command had set up a division of labor, so to speak, with the SS, whereby the SS and police would commit the actual murders, but the Wehrmacht provided them with munitions, logistical support, cordons, and even, occasionally, manpower to do the dirty deeds themselves. In combating “partisans,” German soldiers shot Jews in the tens of thousands. The German Soldat’s “barbarization” in the netherworld of the Eastern Front is explained magnificently by the historian Omer Bartov).

Starting in July and August 1941, the murder squads began to interpret their directives more flexibly. From the beginning they did not flinch at murdering women who they believed, or who they claimed, were supporting partisan activities. In August 1, Himmler gave Bach-Zelewski’s men the order to kill all of the Jewish men under their control and to “drive the Jewish women into the swamps [the Pripet Marshes, which cover much of southern Belarus and northwestern Ukraine].” Some SS commanders took this quite literally; one complained that the women and children did not drown in the swamps as they were too shallow. Others took a broader interpretation; men were shot in droves, the women were driven away with livestock. And yet others took it upon themselves to shoot everyone, down to the last man, woman, and child. The first explicit mention of the murder of Jewish women and children was recorded by Karl Jäger, the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A, in mid-August 1941 in Lithuania. Around the same time, Jeckeln’s units shot some 24,000 Jews in Kamenets-Podolsky in southern Ukraine, mostly Hungarian Jews who had been driven out of their homes into formerly Soviet territory by the Hungarian military. There does not appear from the documentary evidence to have been a centralized order to begin shooting everyone; it began to happen, however, and in a mutually radicalizing process, soon all of the mobile squads were involved. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in the former Soviet territories were murdered by these squads in three sweeps in 1941-42.

The highs and lows, from the Nazi perspective, of the invasion had a significant impact on Lebensraumpolitik and, more specifically, Judenpolitik, and it’s something that historians of the Holocaust have argued about for decades. Did Hitler’s order (Führerbefehl) to exterminate all Jewry occur in the summer of 1941, in the flush of victory; in autumn 1941, when he realized that the Germans were in for a long fight; or in December 1941, when the German offensive petered out only a few miles outside of Moscow and the United States entered the war? There is no scholarly consensus, although most scholars believe the decision happened some time in 1941. I’ve dithered back and forth, and have ultimately been convinced by the argument of the German historian Peter Longerich, which is that there may not have been one, single Führerbefehl. The center of the Nazi command structure, in Berlin, gave guidelines for brutal, radical policies that needed to be enacted; the how’s were figured out by officers on the ground on the periphery; then when those on the periphery acted, if the policies were suitable, they were authorized by the center and then everyone followed suit. This follows the historian Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working toward the Führer” – the men who made it in the jungle of the National Socialist system instinctively grasped what Hitler wanted and carried it out without needing an explicit order. This is not to say that Hitler did not give orders: he did. But he may have issued a series of gradually radicalizing orders, which culminated in what we now call the Holocaust.

Here is my interpretation, cautiously given (these are matters of the highest complexity): the Germans had a long-term plan for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. It was simultaneously part of and apart from Hitler’s “Garden of Eden” in the East. On the one hand, the Nazis had an overarching plan for the entirety of the eastern territories by which, definitionally in the National Socialist mindset, the Jews were of least importance. On the other hand, it was the Jews alone who were to suffer the unique fate of being destroyed in their entirety. The Nazis initially intended to push all of the Jews out of Europe, somewhere beyond the Urals. This was genocidal in any event because they were to be deported to areas with the harshest climates imaginable where they would inevitably starve and die in the millions. This plan did not, however, preclude “temporary” measures such as the mass shootings of Jews perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen. The notion of murdering Jewish men of military age gave way to the notion of working Jews to death: Jews who were healthy and could work would have a temporary stay of execution, all of the rest would be murdered immediately.

When the German offensive stalled, the Nazis hit a rut. The war was not winnable, at least not in the short term, so the Jews could not be deported somewhere to the “East.” The Jews of the Reich needed to go. How could the land of the master race be sullied with Jews? But there were millions of Jews in the General Government, the area between the Vistula and the Bug that was home to the major cities of Krakow, Warsaw, and Lublin. This is not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews crammed into the Lodz Ghetto, located in the area called the Warthegau that had been annexed into Germany. While the Jews of the Reich “had to go”, Hitler and his cronies were hesitant in making such a bold move because they were haunted by their (fantastical) memories of 1918, when the German home front, disillusioned and disunited, “stabbed” the nation’s leadership in the “back.” Germany needed to be united and even the radical Nazis were afraid to rock the boat. Nonetheless, however, eventually Jews were marked with the yellow star in September 1941 and deported to Riga, Latvia; Kaunas, Lithuania; and Minsk, Belarus, where they were shot in the tens of thousands. In order to make room for the rest, the Jews of the Warthegau (the area around Lodz and Poznan) were gassed at Chelmno and the Jews of the General Government were sent to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. The German Jews would then have their turn as the General Government would be gradually Germanized. 

The Jews of the General Government, just mentioned, were murdered because there was nowhere further they could be sent. I do not mean to suggest that the Germans had driven themselves into an ideological cul-de-sac, did not know what to do with the Jews on their hands, and so slaughtered them. Rather, the far off, abstract Final Solution was short-circuited into an all-too real one when the German army did not completely destroy the Soviet Union within a matter of weeks or months. The Judeo-Bolshevik structure centered in Moscow may stand for years yet, but the Jews of the General Government and the Ukraine needed to die to make room for their German betters in the mean time. Odilo Globocnik, one of Himmler’s most loyal men and the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, was obsessed with the notion of Germanic settlement. The Lublin District, specifically the area around Zamosc, would become a jewel of German settlements. This could only come to be, however, if the Poles and the Jews were expelled. Because of the stalled German offensive, Globocnik and Himmler decided to murder the Jews of the Lublin District, if not the entire General Government, at Belzec, whose construction began in October 1941 and began operating in March 1942. It is possible that it was Globocnik who was the first to proffer the idea of the stationary gas chamber to murder the Jews (gas vans had been mobilized in the Warthegau, Serbia, parts of Poland, and in the eastern territories). The gas chamber would have the benefits of being more efficient and secretive than mass shootings and, very importantly to Himmler, easier on the conscience of his men.

It is very possible, even likely, that Belzec was a local “solution” to a local “problem,” as Chelmno was in the Warthegau. However, the Nazis began to realize that the Final Solution did not have to wait until after the victory over the Soviet Union in the East. It could be solved here and now. Sobibor opened its gates two months after, and then Treblinka, the Moloch of the Jews of Warsaw, two months after that. The General Government, originally a dumping ground for Jews and Poles, and then a desired settlement area for Germans, became the abattoir of European Jewry. Globocnik was so proud of having exterminated the Jews that when Himmler demanded, in 1942, that the bodies in the camps needed to be burned to erase all traces, Globocnik demurred, saying that, rather, bronze plaques should be buried along with the corpses to teach the world that it was the Germans who had had the spine to carry out this necessary task. It was no accident that, given the nature of National Socialist ideology, Himmler’s chief subordinate in the realm of German settlement ultimately stood upon the tallest mound of Jewish ashes and bones.

This nightmarish, ghoulish reality was the attempt at, and partial fulfillment of, Hitler’s dream, his “Garden of Eden.”