Download Yehuda Bauer, Plenary Session, June 29

ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR YEHUDA BAUER TO THE HOLOCAUST ERA
ASSETS CONFERENCE PRAGUE 29 JUNE 2009
I had a text of course which I am not going to read, not only because there is no time for
it, but because I think to read a text of a lecture means to say to the people “you can’t
read, so I’m going to read it out for you”. So you will have that text in the proceedings as
well.
I will talk freely and I want to say that the things that I do not know about assets, money,
restitution and so on fill very large libraries. So what I will do I will concentrate on one
topic only and that is Holocaust education and there too, I will deal with a very small
number of issues and things.
I want also apart from congratulating like everyone else quite rightly, the Czech
Presidency and the Czech initiative for this conference, I want to express my admiration
to the remnants of the conference that still fill this hall.
Let me start by saying “Holocaust what does that mean?” It is the term we normally use
and it is an inaccurate term for the genocide of the Jews by the Nazi regime and its
supporters and collaborators.
The Nazis committed many crimes and that included three genocides, according to the
definition of the Genocide Convention of 1948. One was the genocide of the Polish
people; one was the genocide of the Roma; and one was the genocide of the Jews.
Three different genocides committed by the same people, more or less at the same time,
more or less in the same places, for different motives, different motivations, different
outcomes. They have to be kept separate and together and of these the Holocaust is the
most extreme and I will come back to that in a moment.
There is a tendency
Roma -
which was started in the Czech Republic to call the genocide of the
Holocaust. This is a sign of disrespect to the Roma. It makes them an
appendage, a marginal issue attached to the Holocaust of the Jews. That should not be
done. The Roma are a people with a tradition, with their own culture. Their tragedy is
separate. It should be considered as such and should be dealt with.
Should we deal with it? Of course we should. The figures don’t matter they are vastly
exaggerated - so what? What is important is that this was a culture that the Nazis wanted
to destroy. The important thing is that these people, their heirs, their descendants, the
communities from which they came, still suffer from discrimination, still suffer
from being on the margins of society. Who else should deal with their
memory
if not we? Who else should put their claims forward if not we? It was not a Holocaust; it
was a tragedy of the Roma.
And the third thing, the third genocide the Nazis committed was
the peak - was the
genocide of the Jews. Let me deal with these three elements: why should we teach it;
what should we teach; how should we teach it, and just touch the surface.
Why should we teach it?
Because it was the most extreme form of genocide in the history of mankind. Genocide
was not invented in the 1920’ century s. Genocide in a general understanding of that
term the mass destruction of human communities for whatever reason has been with
humanity from its very beginning and I dare say even before that. It is the dark side of
the moon which we don’t dare to teach. Our children are raised on Bismarck and on
Napoleon and on Caesar. They don’t ask at what price these great personalities achieved
what they achieved. The death of millions, the rape of millions, the death of children,
millions upon millions upon millions. The Holocaust was the peak of that, why? Not
because of the suffering of the victims that was the same everywhere. The Jews didn’t
suffer more or less than any other victims of any other genocides of any other mass
murder they is no better genocide than any other genocide.
There is no better mass murder than another murder. There is no better torture than
another torture. There is no better killing of children than other killings of children.
Suffering of human beings cannot be graded. There is no scale
like that.
Suffering is a fate. But the Holocaust included elements in it that are not there in any
other genocide until now. Whereas there are no elements in other genocides that are not
repeated in yet other genocides.
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So the Holocaust is unprecedented, it is not unique. If I said it was unique, I would say
that it cannot be repeated. But it was a human thing that was done and anything humans
do can be repeated by other humans. Never exactly, never precisely, but in general
terms. The Holocaust was not inhuman. The problem is that it was human and it can be
repeated in different ways, therefore it is unprecedented, not unique. What are some only
some, of the other elements of unprecedentedness. The fact that the perpetrators tried to
kill every single person they defined as being Jewish. Not self definition but definition
by the perpetrators.
Never before in human history has anything like that been done.
It was to take place everywhere in the world. On the 28th of November 1941, Adolph
Hitler met with the head of the Palestinian National Movement in support of Nazism, Al
Husseni in Berlin. We have the protocol of that meeting and in that meeting Adolph
Hitler said that “once we win the war we will turn to all the nations of the world to treat
the Jews the way we are treating them here”. Universality – there is no precedent for
that.
You know ideology. Every genocide is rationalised by an ideology but all genocides are
am aware of, the real reasons for them were pragmatic, economic, political, military and
so on. There was no pragmatic reason for killing the Jews. They didn’t own any
territory, they didn’t have any army, they were not a political force, and they were not a
collective. There were Jewish communities all over the place, usually confronting each
other.
The ideology of the Nazis was an invention a hallucination. Never in human history were
millions of people killed because of hallucinations, never. I can prove that. Hitler himself
in August 1936 wrote a memorandum to Herman Goering number 2 in the hierarchy. It’s
been known that document for 60 years and above that ,in which Hitler says that
“Germany must prepare for war within 4 years otherwise the German people will be
annihilated by the Jewish Bolshevist conspiracy which tries to replace the leadership of
all the countries by international Jewry”. The war itself was motivated by an ideology,
not by economics, not by politics. The German people did not want a war. German
capitalists did not want a war. The German military did not want a war. It was a war that
was initiated and led by a Nazi elite that wanted to conquer living space which they
didn’t need. Today Germany is more populus with a much smaller area. They could
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have gotten everything they wanted, raw materials of different kinds, agricultural and
industrial, from a Stalinist regime that was dying to give them everything they wanted so
they won’t attack them. No. The Holocaust was motivated by ideology in the context of
an ideological World War and that war was motivated in large part by anti-Semitism and
the victims in Europe alone were 35 million people, less than 6 million of whom were
Jews but all the rest were non Jews. Anti-Semitism caused the death of 29 million non
Jews in Europe. Isn’t that a good reason to fight anti-Semitism.
The extreme genocide that was the Holocaust, in its after effects, threatens the whole
world. It could be repeated in many ways. In some places something, not the same, not
parallel, not analogous, but slightly similar, is happening and has happened over the past
years. We are not perpetrators, but we are observers who do not dare to intervene to stop
it. I would advocate and this is what should be taught - Globalisation of the Holocaust.
Globalisation in the sense of vertical analysis - historical. Who are the Jews? Who are
the Germans, the Europeans, the world? What is the history behind it? And horizontally.
Do we deal with the 18,000 Jews in Shanghai who were put by the Japanese into a Ghetto
in Shanghai? That’s part of the Holocaust isn’t it? Do we deal with the refusal of Latin
American governments to accept Jewish refugees? That’s part of the Holocaust isn’t it?
Do we deal with what today is Zimbabwe, Rhodesia which under British rule accepted a
little trickle of Jews from central Europe? That’s part of the Holocaust. Do we deal with
what then was Belgian Congo, today the DRC, where Jews from Belgian fled and then
fled on to South Africa? We didn’t particularly like them, but they managed to get there.
That’s part of the Holocaust story isn’t it? The Holocaust is a world issue. It’s got to be
treated like one. It’s got to be taught like one.
Why did the German people who in 1932 in the last free election to the Weimar
Republic, voted against the Nazis - the Nazis in those last free elections lost 2 million
votes and 35 seats in the German Reichstag. They were on the way out and 6 weeks later
they were in power. Why did the German people become part of the murdering machine
and they overwhelmingly did? There is an explanation for that.
Two nights ago a great author in our meeting in the American Embassy said “We need to
find out why, how come, that a great civilisation like Germany did whatever it did? How
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come the Jews couldn’t prevent it? How come the world didn’t intervene?” These are
naïve questions. They have been answered decades ago. We have to deal with the real
questions.
How come that the German people became what it became in 1941/1942? And the
answer is: extremely clever Nazi policies, economic policies, social policies; the abolition
of unemployment; the rise of German industry; the re-entering of Germany into European
politics as an equal and then as a dominant partner. They bribed the German people, but
there is something behind that. If they managed to do it with the Germans it can be done
with the French and the British and the Americans, the Argentineans, the Russians and
anyone else. That is something we must prevent.
There was propaganda, extremely efficient propaganda not only in schools but in the
general public. Propaganda changes things. It can be extremely effective and terribly
dangerous. The Holocaust was not as it was said here wrongly pre-planned. The
Holocaust developed in stages but it was pre-figured by an ideology of which the
Holocaust was the logical conclusion. It was not stated explicitly. Hitler never said
before 1939 what he wanted to do with the Jews. And when he did say it in January 1939
there was no planning behind it we know it today. The planning came along with the
actual murders, why, because there was by that time a consensus in German society to do
this.
He didn’t have to give an order there was no order.
And if someone says
“you can’t prove genocide unless you prove intent”, then there was no Holocaust.
Because you can’t prove intent, because there is no document that actually says “kill the
Jews wherever they are”. It was just done. And there are other genocides like that in
Darfur today in Rwanda yesterday. Before that in the Armenian genocide, before that in
North America and so on and so forth, back, back, back.
No very often, not always the
genocides are not pre-planned, they are pre-figured.
What shall we teach?
Not about the perpetrators alone. The Holocaust was not what the Germans did to the
Jews, Germans and other collaborators of Germany. The Holocaust is the story of the
victims. They were not objects of German murder. They were subjects, they were
communities, they had culture, they had civilisation, they had tradition, they knew they
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were Jews, most of them. They wanted to maintain their Jewish identity. They had no
idea what would happen. Nobody could have had an idea. If the Nazis didn’t pre-plan the
Holocaust how can you expect that the Jews would have known about it or anyone else?
You have to study Jewish history if you want to deal with the Holocaust. You have to
study something about anti-Semitism, although anti-Semitism is not Jewish history.
Most of the time in Jewish history there was no persecution of Jews. Most of the time
Jews lived in different places, without being persecuted. They may not have been loved
sometimes they were loved, they lived alongside others and yes it was punctuated by
persecution. It is a complicated story: Jewish, non-Jewish relationships. If you want to
understand the Holocaust you’ve got to know something about it. And because teachers
can’t know everything and they have no time to study these things and they have very
limited time to teach, you will have to prepare it carefully, in short versions. Not slogans,
not clichés. With examples.
The background of the Holocaust is Christian anti-Semitism. Without that there would
have been no Holocaust. Just with that there would have been no Holocaust either,
because Christianity never planned the genocide of the Jews. It planned their persecution,
the discrimination, the dispossession, the expulsion, yes, but never a genocide. Now
you’ve got to deal with that. You’ve got to deal, if you are Christian, you’ve got to deal
with the fact that every single perpetrator in Europe whatever his or her nationality, was a
baptised heathen. Jews were killed by baptised heathens. Many Christians died saving
Jews. That has to be pointed out.
Many clergy died saving Jews.
Many clergy
participated in the murder, or facilitated it. That has to be said too. There is no black
and white in this story.
We have heard here representatives of different countries; most of them hid their own
participation in the Holocaust. In many countries there was a full scale participation of
large segments of the population, or smaller segments of the population. Should we teach
about the rescue of Bulgarian Jews by the Bulgarian society in 1943? Or should we teach
about the deportation and death of the Jews of
Bulgarian
police,
Bulgarian
armed
Thrace and Macedonia at the hands of
forces
on
Bulgarian
trains
through
Bulgaria to the Danube to be handed over to the Germans? Should we deal with the
rescue of Danish Jews to Sweden? And should we keep quiet about the Danish SS and
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the Danish Nazi Party? Should we deal with Jewish resistance and we should of course,
it is a central issue, and keep quiet about Jewish Gestapo agents, about Jewish police that
handed over Jews to the Nazis? There is no black and white in this story.
As a historian, my Hippocratic Oath is to say the truth as I know it. I will say the truth if
it is extremely unpleasant and if it is more pleasant - both.
Unarmed Jewish resistance happened in many places. Jewish communities couldn’t
resist by arms, because they didn’t have any; because the surrounding societies wouldn’t
support it; because the allies couldn’t care less. They opposed Nazism by unarmed
means; by culture; by art; by trying to rescue orphans; by establishing hospitals; by
sacrificing themselves in places where there were typhoid epidemics; by things that you
wouldn’t dream of. It didn’t happen everywhere. There were places where the Jewish
community simply disintegrated, where nobody helped anyone else, where there was no
social welfare, no religious
underground, no political underground. And there were
places where all that happened. The only genocide I know of where the victims tried to
resist by unarmed resistance was the Holocaust. But as I said, not everywhere. We have
to teach that. That’s crucial because all of us are more likely to become victims and
observers and bystanders and not perpetrators. Because humanity is a victim, humanity
are bystanders and the Jews were victims and how they behaved is a crucial element in
teaching the world of who the world is and what it could possibly become.
Now the Holocaust while it happened was a marginal occurrence in the war. The
Holocaust after it was over was a marginal thing in the consciousness of people. The
State of Israel was not established by the Holocaust. Nobody, except for the Soviet
representative, who did it for purely instrumental reasons, mentioned the suffering of the
Jews during World War II in their internal correspondence and speeches at the United
Nations when they decided on the partition of Palestine between an Arab and a Jewish
State. This whole business that Israel was created because of a guilt complex is sheer
nonsense. Nobody cared. There were immediate political considerations - they led to the
partition decision. There are lies, there are mistakes. We have to try our best. We won’t
succeed fully I’m sure, to correct them.
.
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Lastly, how should it be taught? I am not a pedagogue. I’m not a dialectician, but I’ve
been teaching the Holocaust for quite a while. Now, if you teach the Holocaust in the
Czech Republic, you’ve got to teach about the Roam because that’s part of it, not of the
Holocaust, but almost all Czech Roma were killed, here. Well they were transported to
Auschwitz, but they were collected here. Partly, well more than partly, by Czech police
acting on behalf of a collaborationist autonomous entity called the
protectorate
government. It’s got to be dealt with here. Terezin is a crucial issue for all of Holocaust
education. You can’t teach the Holocaust in the Czech Republic without relating to
Terezin. If you do only that, you deal with the trees and not with the forest. You’ve got
to treat the forest. It’s I said it’s a European, a global issue. You can’t remain in your
local problem but you can’t ignore them either, so you’ve got to combine them local and
general.
How shall we teach it?
You have to be aware that you cannot teach the Holocaust just by what I did now for
Germany, namely by an attempt at analysis. It will send your students asleep. You’ve got
to combine it with the personal stories of the people and all the personal stories of
Holocaust survivors and about the Holocaust generally, are stories of dilemmas. You’ve
got to teach dilemmas - you can’t avoid it. The student may not remember your analysis
after ten years - the story will be remembered and from the story the analysis can be
reconstructed. So let me end as I usually do those of you who know me, with a story. It
is not a story that will be published in the paper. I hate repeating my stories. It will be a
different one. It’s well known actually.
In Lodz in Poland. Lodz the second largest Jewish community in Poland. The ghetto was
established in April/May 1940 and the ruler, the Jewish ruler of the ghetto was an old
man, well he was younger than I am now, but he was an old man by the name of
Mordecai
Rumkowski.
Most
of
you
know
about
him.
And
Rumkowski had the idea when the situation developed and deteriorated, that the only way
of saving some Jews, would be to enslave the population, let them work for the Germans
without any consideration of their health and their capability of survival, enslave them
terribly. Now that is what happened and as a result about 9% of all the German army’s
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requirements of uniforms and some other accessories were produced in the Lodz ghetto
by Jews. And therefore the Wermacht opposed the liquidation of the ghetto for pragmatic
reasons. And the Nazi rulers of the ghetto earned their keep if you want to put it
cynically, by exploiting the Jews and robbing them of the remnants of their property.
They took away part of the food that was supplied to the ghetto and sold it on the black
market. And if the ghetto was liquidated, they were all young men; they would be drafted
to the German army to serve on the Eastern Front which wasn’t too pleasant for them.
And so the Nazis, the local Nazis, opposed the liquidation of the ghetto.
On the 22nd of June 1944, the only ghetto in Poland still there was the ghetto of Lodz and
on that day the Red Army started its great offensive which smashed through the German
central front and by August they had reached the Vistula River. They stopped there for
reasons that have nothing to do with Jews or with Lodz or anything like that. In the
meantime Berlin intervened and said “no economic considerations weigh anything. Jews
have to be killed”. And in June and then again in August, the ghetto of Lodz was
liquidated.
And when the Soviet army resumed its advance in January 1945, within 3 days they had
liberated Lodz. They found over 800 Jews there who had been kept by the Germans to
clear up the ghetto and ship the contents of what was left to Germany. And in those 3
days the Germans had other worries and those 800 plus people, were liberated.
And now a counter factual issue. Let me assume that the Soviet army wouldn’t have
stopped on the Vistula River, but on the Warta further west, and within three days they
would have conquered Lodz and liberated the tens of thousands of Jews who were still
alive at the time. Would we then have hung Rumkowski from high gallows, because he
delivered Jewish children to the Nazis not only knowing what would happen to them, but
announcing it to the ghetto population in September 1942? Would we have hung him, or
would we have established a big centre with a statute in honour of the great
Rumkowski, because of whom, tens of thousands of Jews were saved? That is the real
dilemma not the invented one. So what do you say - gallows or statue? There is no
answer to that dilemma, like there is no answer to any of the dilemmas of the Holocaust.
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The only answer is this. We should never be placed in a situation where such dilemmas
are placed before us, and we should teach and do everything in our power, that this
should not happen.
Two hundred years before Christ there lived a great Jewish sage – Hillel. His teachings
were then used by Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount. And Hillel was asked to explain the
Jewish teachings standing on one foot and he said: “do not do unto the other what you
would not have done to yourself”. But then he added: “and now go and learn”.
So my friends now go and learn - and teach.
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