34: Denying History -- Contingent History

"Life's history is massively contingent -- crucially dependent upon odd particulars of history, quite unpredictable and unrepreatable themselves, that divert futures into new channels, shallow and adjacent to old pathways first, but deepening and diverging with the passage of time. We can explain the actual pathways after they unroll, but we could not have predicted their course. And if we play the game of life again, history would roll down another set of utterly different but equally explainable channels."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

"It is only when we look backward that history assumes a predictable pattern. Viewed the other way around, as it is lived, it abounds in inexplicable turns and strange surprises."

-- Arthur Herman

In Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman argue that Gould is right. In Part III of their book, Arguments and Refutations, the authors state:

"Life's history is massively contingent -- all facets of it: the history of civilization, the history of war, the history of the Holocaust, the history of the Nazi concentration camps. Holocaust deniers seem unaware of this contingency. They think that because extermination camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek do not look like perfectly designed killing machines no one used them for genocide. However, history is a product of both planned and unplanned events. Rarely do historical events unfold as expected. What typically happens is that plans change as events cascade, one upon another. As these plans and events interact and change, they create a feedback loop that constantly alters the events as they develop, often driving them further and further away from original intentions. A brief history of the evolution of the extermination camps in general, and Auschwitz in particular, supports this contingent view of history."

Well before the Nazis herded prisoners into gas chambers, they had developed a program of secret and systematic murder of targeted peoples. It began with sterilization programs in the early 1930s, evolved into the euthanasia programs of the late 30s, and escalated into mass murder in the extermination camps from 1941 to 1945. Although the idea of gassing large numbers of prisoners seems shocking, psychologists have indicated how easy it is to get people to do almost anything when the steps leading to it are small and incremental. Shermer and Grobman contend that after the Nazis had murdered tens of thousands "inferior" Germans in the T-4 program, the idea of attempting to annihilate the Jewish people did not appear unimaginable. The demonization, exclusion, expulsion, sterilization, deportation, and euthanasia of targeted peoples made the step to mass murder seem a small one.

The Third Reich had passed sterilization laws in late 1933. Within a year 32,268 people had been sterilized. In 1935, the figure jumped to 73,174, with the official reasons including feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, manic-depressive psychosis, alcoholism, deafness, blindness, and malformations.

In 1935, Hitler told the leading Reich physician, Gerhard Wagner, that when the war began he wanted to make the shift from sterilization to euthanasia. True to his word, in the summer of 1939, the Nazis began killing physically handicapped children, then quickly moved on to mentally handicapped children, and soon after to adults with either handicap. The murders were initially committed through large doses of "normal" medication given in tablet or liquid form, so as to look like an accident. If the patients resisted, injections were used. When the numbers chosen for death became cumbersomely large, however, the operations were moved into special killing wards instead of isolated units.

As the numbers increased, so too did the complications of murder on such a scale. Mass murder requires a mass murder process, and medications and injections were no longer efficient. The T-4 administrators set up six killing centers wherein gas chambers were disguised as showers. In these killing centers we see all the components of the extermination camps like Auschwitz. Through time the Nazi bureaucracy evolved along with the T-4 killing centers, setting the stage for the conversion of concentration camps into extermination camps. By 1941-42 this conversion was just another incremental step in the contingently evolving system that became the Final Solution.

The contingent history of the euthanasia program also helps answer the question of what happened to "the" order from Hitler to eliminate the Jews. In the opinion of Shermer and Grobman, one of the reasons there is no record of a written order by Hitler is that he once authorized in writing the euthanasia of handicapped patients and this fact came back to haunt him when the press ran critical stories about the euthanasia program. Hitler, it appears, realized that such actions needed to be taken in secret, and certainly not ordered in writing. Furthermore, it seems that as a general principle, Hitler preferred not to sign orders himself. There is no order signed by Hitler, for example, to start the war.

Additionally, what the Nazis learned in the T-4 program, along with subterfuge and secrecy and the methods of mass murder, was that the public would not tolerate such activities on German soil. As a result of public outcry, the Nazis located the death camps in occupied Poland, far from the watchful eyes of the German public and press.

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Holocaust deniers assume that because historians have determined that Auschwitz ended up being an extermination camp, we should be able to show it was originally designed as an extermination camp. Since the layout, design and function of Auschwitz do not match what we might expect to find in a perfectly designed extermination camp, deniers then argue that it was not an extermination camp at all. In general, this argument is flawed because historical outcomes rarely match historical intentions. In particular, it is flawed because we can trace the changes that occurred at Auschwitz, and this can be done with the other extermination camps as well.

The architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt, in a brilliant essay entitled "A Site in Search of a Mission," has demonstrated through chronology of blueprints and architectural designs of Auschwitz, that modern myths about the camp have erased the historical contingencies of its origin and development. In his essay, and even more poignantly in his 1996 book coauthored with Deborah Dwork, van Pelt unravels the contingencies that constructed the necessity that became the Auschwitz we know today. The problem is that we are trying to understand the early stages of Auschwitz by what now remains. The original intention of Auschwitz, however, was quite different:

"Auschwitz was not preordained to become the major site of the Holocaust. It acquired that role almost by accident, and even the fact that it became a site of mass murder at all was due more to the failure to achieve one goal than to the ambition to realize another."

The focus on the final stage of Auschwitz as a killing machine has prevented us from understanding its contingent history, as well as how anyone could assume the role of mass murderer. Dwork and van Pelt put Auschwitz and its operators in historical context, observing:

"This almost comfortable demonization [of a place of preordained mass murder] relegates the camp and the events that transpired there to the realm of myth, distancing us from all too concrete historical reality, suppressing the local, regional, and national context of the greatest catastrophe western civilization both permitted and endured, and obscuring the responsibility of the thousands of individuals who enacted this atrocity step by step. None of them was born to be a mass murderer, or an accomplice to mass murder. Each of them inched his way to iniquity."

Auschwitz (or Oswiecim), it seems, was to be a district capital, a center of mass industry, and a model city that would project the image of an ideal future city for the Thousand-Year Reich. Concentration camps were originally designed as instruments of terror to control resistance to the Nazi Party (Dachau is the classic case), but in time, as they evolved, they furnished labor for productive work, especially after 1939 and the start of the war. Before the war the free labor of the camps would have competed with German businesses and thus increased unemployment, which went against Nazi policy. When the war began, however, the camps took on two new functions: providing a source of labor and housing prisoners of war. And, as more and more of Germany's productive labor joined the armed services, these two functions blended into one, with prisoners providing the free labor.

In 1940, Himmler began to make plans for the future of Auschwitz. The industrial giant I. G. Farben would have a plant in Auschwitz, all Jews and Poles would be removed from the region, and Auschwitz itself would become "a paradigm of the settlement in the East." Within two months, a master architectural plan to reconstruct and enlarge the camp was completed: it included an SS garden city and a center for agricultural experimentation.

Plans changed on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Contingencies once again altered future necessities, and the crooked timber of Auschwitz took another twisted turn. With the initial success of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, Russian prisoners of war came pouring into Auschwitz, suddenly transforming the camp into an instrument of war. Conditions were brutal and thousands of Russians died monthly from disease and starvation. Barracks were hastily thrown up to house the POWs, and new crematoria had to be added to dispose of the bodies.

The model-city-turned-POW-camp was, de facto, rapidly on its way to becoming an extermination camp. After the Russian armies began to hold the line against the Germans and it became clear that Operation Barbarossa was going to become a protracted affair, Auschwitz was further expanded to house up to 100,000 prisoners, primarily for labor. Eventually, the supply of free Russian labor began to dry up. Himmler needed a replacement, and he found it in the Jews. The evolution of Auschwitz toward its final end as an extermination camp now took a dramatic leap.

At the Wansee conference in January 1942, plans for the Final Solution were coordinated. Six days later, Himmler sent the following telegram to the inspector of concentration camps, Richard Gluecks: "As no Russian prisoners of war can be expected in the near future, I am sending to the camps a large number of Jews who have emigrated from Germany. Will you therefore make preparation to receive within the next four weeks 100,000 Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the concentration camps? The concentration camps will be faced with great economic tasks in the coming weeks."

Indeed they were. Three weeks later, the first transport of Jews arrived, whereupon the young and healthy were put to work and the old and infirm were gassed and cremated. When this procedure became cumbersome, given the confines of the camp's original design, it was moved three kilometers away, from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), where new crematoria were constructed and the killing escalated as the war intensified.

Yet all the while, says van Pelt, "the extermination of the Jews was meant to be a transient phenomenon in the history of the camp." Plans were continued to convert the camp yet again after the war, but "that other future never materialized. Thus the name Auschwitz became synonymous with the Holocaust, and not with Himmler's model town."

As the war turned against Germany, the Nazis became even more determined to exterminate the Jews. Auschwitz, because of its use of Zyklon-B, became the most efficient of the six extermination camps.