The Myth

There is a myth that has attached itself to the reality of the Holocaust. This is not the absurdist fantasy of Holocaust deniers, who hold that the act itself was a myth. No, this much larger, much more insidious myth is held by most people who acknowledge the overall facts of the Holocaust itself.

The myth to which I'm referring is the one that holds that the vast majority of the German people did not know, could NOT have know, would NEVER have approved of, could NEVER have directly participated in the greatest crime of all time, in the willful murder of babies torn from their mothers' arms.

The fact, which I've only just realized in all its awfulness (as if it were not already awful enough) is that the overwhelming majority of Germans assented to the extermination of the Jews and that millions of them participated in knowingly facilitating the murder.

When Germans in EVERY German town and city saw their Jewish neighbors arrested by their own government, saw other Germans move into the Jews' houses, and heard of thousands of Jews being shipped to the east from public train stations, where exactly did they think those Jews were going? Switzerland? Palestine? Someplace BETTER than the neighborhoods where they had lived for decades?

This is a difficult myth to unravel, perhaps because of how awful the findings are. Subconsciously, this must be why we cling to this myth, but it's really quite stunning how absurd the myth appears if we take a step back.

The myth tells us that what "happened to" Germany could "happen to" anyone, that any society could be whipped into a murderous frenzy given the adequate demagoguery and that the most "civilized" people can do unspeakable things in the name of "orders".

The myth tells us that the lesson of the Holocaust is somehow a lesson about the dangers of organized mobs or cold industrialism or a lack of civil liberties, the type of thing that could happen almost anywhere in a crisis.

The problem with this myth is that there are no Germans in it, and no Jews. The Germans tried to exterminate the Jews. No other society. Only Germany. The Holocaust happened because the Germans did it. And the Germans did it because their society was overwhelmingly antisemitic to a degree and depth that surpassed the most vicious strains of American racism.

The actual killing of the Jews is what one thinks of when one hears "Holocaust". But let's pretend that the Jews weren't actually murdered. Let's assume that World War II never happened. Let's assume that Hitler had swallowed up all the German territory he did and then had stopped. What would this alternate, "peaceful" Germany have looked like?

Well, Jews (far less than 1% of the German population, just to give you a sense of the pathologically disproportionate extent of the obsession) would have no legal rights. Jews would have no civil, political, or human rights. Jews would be forbidden from participating in society, would be spat upon and beaten in public, would be arbitrarily robbed and arrested, and would die either in a walled-off ghetto or a slave labor camp. But they would not be systematically murdered.

So, even if we leave out that "last" part, that part that makes it the Holocaust, what would we think of Germany? The circumstances described above are not really hypothetical at all; they existed in Germany when the war began. So, after all of these abuses were being heaped upon the Jews, in public, by private and public citizens alike, how can we think that "most" Germans did not know about the "final" solution?

As this becomes clearer, we begin to realize that horror of this hatred was simply common sense in Germany. We realize that Germans accepted the inherent evil of the Jew just as unblinkingly as Americans accept the inherent evil of dictatorship or the proposition that the earth is round.

We realize that the hatred that defined the German attitude towards Jews on the macro level was so ingrained that it is difficult to describe it as "evil", since that would seem to consign all of Germany to a Bushworld rendering of blanket guilt. But what else can we conclude?

A point of comparison helps any study, so let's think about American racism. American racism at its worst (let's say, Mississippi in 1850 or 1950) approximated German antisemitism in the sense that blacks and Jews were seen as "socially dead", incapable and undeserving of dignity and inherently separate and unworthy of citizenship.

But there was a fundamental difference. In America, blacks were meant to work. In Germany, Jews were meant to die. In America, mass media ultimately shamed the country into granting blacks full civil and legal and political and human rights, even if most white Americans still kept their distance from any actual black folks. In Germany, mass media ultimately was used to inspire the nation not to liberate, but to exterminate.

The evidence of mass murderous hatred is so clear, so obvious, so beyond rationale refutation, that it hides in plain slight. How could any person actually think that the Holocaust did not reflect the society that carried it out?

One must believe that Hitler single-handedly brainwashed the most literate nation in the world to do the most unspeakable thing in history and, what's more, he did so in a society that had no murderous predisposition towards the Jews before Hitler appeared as a Gorilla from the mist (and was elected Chancellor).

All this, of course, makes it more terrible. As if a man capable of brainwashing tens of millions of people weren't terrible enough, what of the prospect of tens of millions of people WILLINGLY doing what the Germans did? Because that's what happened.

Having recently indulged in the taboo of reassessing Germany's conduct in World War II, I was shocked at how legitimate the grievances of Germany were. What is truly tragic about the entire experience, however, is that Germany, at its heart, was sick. The Sickness is what killed Germany.

It was not invading the Soviet Union. It was not declaring war on the United States. Despite the delusional grandeur of Germany taking on the entire world, Germany STILL would have won their war. Except...

Germany lost the war because, as it pursued its legitimate military and political goals with unmatched organization and precision, it was all the while tearing the heart out of humanity itself.

Even as it tried to make war, German "soldiers" were occupied with murdering millions of women and children, including German citizens whose education and resources and (former) patriotism could have won the war for the Reich, had the Reich not been obsessed with mudering 1% of its citizens.

It happened. It happened because an entire society wanted it to happen and allowed it to happen and DID it themselves. The Sickness exists. And thank God I don't subscribe to the Nazi theory of racial determinism. Because I'm half German.