A Look Further…
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know.”
— John Adams, 1765
By M. L. Warmath
Why do we commemorate historical events?
First of all, I want extend my best wishes to all who have started their Ramadan fast. May you and your families receive all the good things during this holy month. Ramadan Mubarak!
Washington: As I was getting this draft into shape, I saw that the White House has provided a state-by-state summary list of how the American Jobs Plan will help each state. You can find your state here:
and access the detailed Fact Sheet here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/
President Biden has also proclaimed this week Black Maternal Health week. We must strive for equity in pre-natal and maternity care so that all mothers can rest assured to receive the care that they, and their babies, will receive the quality care they deserve.
A Proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week, 2021 | The White House
FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Initial Actions to Address the Black Maternal Health Crisis | The White House
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, NIAID Director and Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci, and COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, April 13, 2021 | The White House
Also, in light of the suspension of the administration of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine, a Press Briefing was held with Dr. Fauci and Jeff Zients to give details regarding this decision and the steps taken to ensure vaccinations continue.
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, NIAID Director and Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci, and COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, April 13, 2021 | The White House
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Last week Yom Ha’Shoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – was on Wednesday, and it was also Holocaust Remembrance Week here in the U.S.
President Biden issued “A Proclamation on Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust, 2021” on April 4, in which we are reminded of the need to “to remember and reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust. An estimated six million Jews perished alongside millions of other innocent victims — Roma and Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others — systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in one of the cruelest and most heinous campaigns in human history.”
You can read his full proclamation here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/04/04/a-proclamation-on-days-of-remembrance-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-2021/
Holocaust Remembrance Days are when we also think about how this genocide happened, or at least we should try. We can’t change things for the better very effectively if we don’t have some understanding of how they develop and are implemented in the first place and how these concepts carry over from and into successive periods and generations.
This understanding is even more important right now as we are witnessing certain high-level elected officials and national media personalities publicly embrace and promote, in various terms and with no compunction whatsoever, the very same theories that eventually led to one of the most violently genocidal policies in modern civilization. These constructs didn’t simply disappear in a bunker in Berlin or at the Nuremburg trials and it is important to recognize them and put a stop to their propagation, especially since they are being flaunted before our very eyes under a veil of different semantics.
Below is a small smorgasbord of these theories and their effects.
The Nazi movement grew largely out of the late 19th-century Völkisch movement, which was a nationalist, populist movement inspired by romantic nationalism, mystical notions of “ancient German civilization” and the Holy Roman Empire, and belief in German superiority. It’s actually more complex than that and also relates to common language, territory, folklore, and culture, and all of these fundamental tenets were embraced by Nazism: “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and Soil”); “Lebensraum” (“living space”). Hitler himself stated that “the basic ideas of national socialism were völkisch”, and the term “völkisch” was also used in the Nazi period by Germans to set themselves apart from and above other people, in particular Jews.
Moreover, Nazis adhered to the theory of Aryanism, which is a race concept based on pseudo-science, Social Darwinism and other theories that also became highly popular in the 19th century. This theory derives in part from various (mis)interpretations of the word “aryan”, from the religious and ethnic (but not racial) label “ārya” that the ancient Indo-Iranians used to refer to themselves as a group, and which also means “noble, respectable”. (The Old Persian variant “ariya” was only used in an ethnic sense and evolved into the modern-day adjective “Iranian”.) This term was thus applied in the 19th century to the Proto-Indo-Iranian language. Since the Indo-Iranian languages were the most ancient languages then known relative to the Indo-European languages, “aryan” came to be used to refer to all Proto-Indo-European speakers.
I’ve tried to summarize this as simply as possible, but there is more explanation of the word at the following links, with examples of how it influenced European languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryan
One concept led to another, pseudo-science again stepped in, and “aryan” came to be applied to refer to all people of Proto-Indo-European descent to classify them as a sub-race of what was at the time referred to as the “Europoid” or “Caucasian” race. I put that term in quotes because in light of the genomic and genetic research of the past couple of decades or so, “Caucasian” is an outdated term and should not be used any more. In fact, “race” itself is now commonly viewed by social scientists as a social classification and not a biological one, which I’m sure you already knew.
Aryansim and the theory of a “master race” were promoted by the French aristocrat and writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who, after the 1848 revolution in France, began to write about the decline of aristocratic Europe and the takeover of those he saw as the “common race”. He was a staunch Bourbon loyalist who had spent much of his childhood in Germany and had lived in Switzerland and been minister to several other countries before moving back to Paris and lamenting the downfall of the aristocracy.
De Gobineau thus took up the 17th century theory of French Count Henri de Boulainvilliers, who held that the French aristocracy was uniquely the product of its Frankish (Germanic) invaders – founders of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties – and not of the Gallo-Romans. Never mind that some of the greatest Frankish cities like Reims, France – the very city in which the Frankish kings were originally baptized and crowned and legitimized – had been founded by the Gallo-Romans and was one of the major cities in the Roman Empire; de Boulainvilliers simply dismissed that highly inconvenient historical fact. In furtherance of this theory, in his own poem Manfredine, de Gobineau depicts the “Germanic people [with the] blond hair of their ancestors” as “emerging to rule” whereas those who were not German were “created to serve”.
Simply put, de Gobinau and those who believed in “Aryanism” were promoting “white (northern European) supremacy”.
De Gobinot’s white supremacist ideas naturally found favor with American pro-slavery groups, who translated them – although they did make sure to leave out the parts with his unfavorable conclusions about Americans being “racially-mixed”. De Gobinot’s beliefs were also promoted and developed in Europe by writers like French anthropologist Count Georges Victor de Lapouge, who also supported the theories of eugenics and racialism.
Racialism is another pseudo-scientific belief that racism and racial superiority can be justified by certain biological characteristics. In fact, “racialism” is just a dressed-up form of the word “racism” and is classified today as “scientific racism.” (Hell on Wheels fans will recall the dogged conviction with which Dr. Major Augustus Bendix studied “phrenology” and the appalling detail with which he expounded, after he and his men had massacred a group of Native Americans, on whether or not the elderly woman whose severed head he was contemplating was “civilized”. That’s one illustration of “racialism.”)
Eugenics is “the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans” (Encyl. Britannica). Plato was already musing about this kind of “selection” in his time, but this theory became immensely popular internationally in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Other proponents of these theories were Englishman Sir Francois Galton, who first used the term “eugenics” in 1883 after having been greatly influenced by Darwin’s work, and American Madison Grant, who expounded on the “Nordic theory” purported in the early 1900s by Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker. Grant was the author of The Passing of the Great Race, a work which was qualified by another American, the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, as “the most influential tract of American scientific racism”.
Connecticut-born Charles Davenport was a prominent biologist and eugenicist who founded the Eugenics Records Office in New York in 1910 and promoted and contributed to the study of eugenics in the United States. He also founded the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations whose “Commission on Bastardization and Miscegenation” was chaired by none other than Nazi party member Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhem Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Davenport’s work was influential in the development of the Nazis’ theories about interracial marriage and their programs to eradicate the Slavs.
Racialism and public health were rapidly associated and the notion of “racial hygiene” was coined in 1895 as “Rassenhygiene” by the German biologist and eugenicist Alfred Plotz, founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene which also advocated ideas such as selective breeding. This was to prevent any “dilution” of “pure” German blood. The idea that other “races” would “dilute” and thus “eliminate” pure Germans was propaganda that the Nazis used very effectively. It can thus be seen that “bringing in ‘Others’ to supplant the ‘superior’ class” has long been a common scare tactic to get people to adhere to these kinds of policies. “Jews will not replace us” did not appear in Charlottesville; it was the slogan of anti-Semitic movements in Nazi Germany as well. “Replacement” is an effective propaganda tool to get one group to oppose progressive ideas.
You can read more about race, racialism and eugenics at the following links, and I’m sure you’ll find other things you either already knew or that may surprise you.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human
https://www.britannica.com/topic/racism
https://www.britannica.com/science/eugenics-genetics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_race
Now, these 19th- and early 20th-century theories were themselves based on research and concepts dating back to the 17th and 18th century “age of Enlightenment” (please take the term with a grain of salt, because despite “forward-thinking” philosophical trends people were still very much in the dark) and to various adhesions to and interpretations of the works of Buffon, Bradley, Meiners, and Linneaus, among many others.
I could go on but I had intended this to be a “background intro” only. Suffice it to say that all of these concepts and periods provided the ingredients for the cocktail of ideas that led to the Nazi definition of the ideal “Aryan” as being the blond-hair and blue-eyed “Nordic” type and of the German people as being the highest form of Aryans whether or not they actually had blond hair and blue eyes. Meanwhile, down in Italy, Mussolini was telling everyone that Italians were in fact a southern branch of Aryans.
Now that we have the first component of the German National Socialist party, “national”, what about the “socialist” part? Because the Nazis actually wanted nothing to do with socialists in the political sense and did their utmost to annihilate them.
But wait, there’s more.
As complicated as this may sound, Count Lapouge was a socialist and even lost his university teaching position because of his activism in founding the French Worker’s Party. Yet he still persisted in his racialist and Aryan theories while writing a number of works. These works and theories directly influenced the foundation of the… National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a.k.a. the Nazi party, which in fact totally rejected and wanted to rid the world of Marxist or Leninist “socialist” movements.
The keyword here is “national”. National Socialism is the farthest right from Marxism and Democratic Socialism as you can get. The Nazi party put forward the concept of “Volksgemeinschaft”, “a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk” (Britannica.com) but in fact this was more particularly to create an environment conducive to control with a view to military and ethnic dominance and not at all to actually provide for the people’s common good and pursuit of happiness. In fact, the people were expected to go along with this government policy and take pride in it. This was also the Stalinist point of view in the Soviet Union.
In a nutshell, adhering to the Nazi movement meant you wholeheartedly subscribed to the party line which essentially boiled down to “the only deserving people are pure Germans, pure Germans are the superior Ayrans, you the people don’t have any say in this anyway, and everybody else be damned.” In other words, not just “Germany first” but “Germany only.” This is probably the only place where any vague relation to “socialism” might weigh in, i.e., what was good for Nazi Aryan German society and nobody else. The term “socialist” might also have been used just because it was the word du jour or because the Nazis wanted to create their own brand of “socialism.”
At any rate, it goes to show you can’t tell a book by its cover. Remember that some of the most authoritarian countries in the world have “Republic” in their names. When a party calls itself “socialist”, it behooves us to find out what kind. If the word “national” appears in the name, you should know by now it’s the ultra-right.
So, Hitler didn’t invent Aryanism or nationalism. Hitler didn’t “start” with the Jews, either. Jews have been discriminated against and persecuted in Europe in various violent actions and other pogroms since the Seleucid Empire, just as the Roma and Sinti have been discriminated against and persecuted since before the Middle Ages with a particularly notable increase under the Weimar Republic in Germany. Therefore, all Hitler himself had to do was to amplify the persecution of these two groups – and anyone else – as far as he and his followers could imagine, which as we know had no taboos. But first, the Nazi regime set up and tested various programs. You all know Niemoller’s statement, right? “First they came for the Socialists…”
Disabled people were among the first to be subjected to Hitler’s Aryan concept of “cleansing”. Hitler, and the Nazi party in general, believed the disabled were “impure” and a financial burden on the State. On July 14, 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” was passed. There were nine “diseases”, including severe deformity, epilepsy, alcohol abuse, blindness, and deafness. People who were found to have these “diseases” were to be sterilized so that the Reich “could achieve racial purity.” Some 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized under this policy.
In 1939, the Nazis took it exponentially further. In the fall of that year, the treatment of the “disabled” on the “list” moved from “sterilization” to “euthanasia”, which was concealed by being reported as “stroke” or other causes of sudden death. The program, known as Aktion T4, mainly involved patients in State-run asylums and nursing homes, including elderly patients with dementia. Those targeted were taken to “killing centers” to be “euthanized”. At first, lethal injections were used but the Nazis found it more expedient to switch to mass killing in gas chambers as well as in large delivery vans in which from 20 to 50 or more victims would be locked into the load compartment of the van which would then be flooded with carbon monoxide gas. Over 70,000 people were put to death under this program.
The program was continued more or less secretly until it was found out in 1941. At the ensuing public and church outcry, the program was halted but its intent was perpetuated, for example, through the starvation or lethal injection of disabled children in hospitals and the propaganda that continued to label the disabled as “degenerates.”
In pre-WWII Germany, the Nazis viewed the Roma and Sinti as people who had migrated from India and, due to intermarriage with “lower” races, had become “degenerates.” They were first “classified” under “racial hygiene” policies based on pseudo-science and interviews, according to their supposed “degree of Gypsy purity”. While the Roma and Sinti have been discriminated against in Europe for centuries, in Nazi Germany their persecution radically escalated to internment in ghettos and work camps, followed by sterilization, experimentation and extermination due to the horrific sanitary conditions and starvation in the ghettos and camps or to the nature of the experiments conducted on them at the camps and to outright gassing in converted delivery vans and gas chambers. It is unknown how many Roma and Sinti were actually killed but some estimates range in the 500,000s – for a population according to one estimate of some 1.5 million in Europe prior to WWII.
Under the Nazi regime, communists, social democrats, political opponents, priests, and other critics were also arrested, sent to camps and often executed, and this practice escalated steadily throughout the war. Among the most famous were two young university students from Munich, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl. Their crime? Publishing clandestine anti-Nazi pamphlets for the “White Rose” resistance group beginning in 1942. Their sentence? They were arrested at Munich University on February 18, 1943 and guillotined four days later, only a few hours after a sham trial in which the defendants were forbidden to speak.
Other groups were also surveilled, persecuted, arrested, imprisoned and murdered, including religious groups and members of organizations Hitler and the Nazis disliked or felt threatened their power. Concentration camps were erected immediately after Hitler came to power; the first of these, and brutal model for the ensuing ones, was the infamous Dachau. Their initial purpose was to house political prisoners. But very quickly the LBGTQ community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, Blacks and of course Jews were targeted.
The Nazi persecution of the Jews is well-known thanks to education, documentation and of course remembrance days. We must never forget how the Jewish community was looted, interned in ghettos, starved, tormented and tortured, or how the Third Reich intentionally tried to exterminate them in the ghastliest ways they could imagine. It is one of the most singularly shameful periods in history.
Jews and Roma were not the only ethnic communities the Nazis wanted to eliminate, however. The Nazi Party, along with Italian fascists, considered Slavs “non-Aryan sub-humans” and their policy was to exterminate, remove or enslave them and replace them in their own lands by “good Germans” or “good Italians”. After Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis particularly targeted the Soviet Union, which they felt had been “taken over” by Slavs, and to this end they devised the “Hunger Plan” in which food produced in the Soviet Union was confiscated and given to German troops and civilians.
An estimated four million Soviet citizens perished under this plan; however, the “resettlement” component was mostly carried out in neighboring Poland. The proponents of the Hunger Plan estimated that some three million Poles would also be exterminated by starvation under this policy; this number did not materialize due to an abundant harvest in 1943 but it is estimated that between 500,000 and 600,000 Poles were nevertheless starved to death. Poles received an average daily caloric intake of about 700 calories and Jews in ghettos less than 200, compared to about 2,600 for Germans. A similar starvation plan in Greece led to the deaths of 200,000 Greeks.
Mussolini’s persecution of the Slavs led to summary executions, kidnappings, village-burnings, reprisals and internment at a number of concentration camps such as the ones in in Rab, Croatia, and Gonars, Italy. Prisoners suffered from malnutrition, disease, and exposure and were kept in open-air tents in the most insalubrious conditions. They were interned and killed simply because they were Slavs. Among them were men and women, elders and children, poets, children’s writers, artists, architects, scientists – all professions and all walks of life, including the current president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jacob Finci, who was born in the Rab concentration camp.
Under the Nazi regime, Blacks were persecuted and discriminated against, again on racial grounds. Marriage between, “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” was considered “Rassenschande” (“racial shame.”) Among the worst actions taken against Blacks in Nazi Germany was the mass sterilization of the “Rhineland Children” in 1937. These were about 800 children of German women and Black French soldiers who had fought in WWI. Nearly 400 of these children were forcibly sterilized just before they reached adulthood. In the early years of WWII there were several occurrences of Black French soldiers being summarily executed when captured by the Nazis. Blacks were also imprisoned in forced labor camps and those who were not had to carry “papers” and comply with a plethora of discriminatory laws and regulations similar to Jim Crow laws to avoid being incarcerated.
The practices carried out in Nazi Germany, Austria, Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe and in Mussolini’s Italy also extended to other countries. Tens of thousands of indigenous were massacred in North Africa. Half the Bedouin population perished either in concentration camps or starved to death. 100,000 Libyans were deported and 40,000 died in camps. In England, 43,000 British civilians and hundreds of pilots were killed in the Blitz. A Nazi blockade of food and fuel supplies in 1944 to led to the Dutch famine of 1944-45. Guernica in Basque country was destroyed by the Nazi Luftwaffe and Italian air forces at the behest of the nationalist Franco faction. On June 10, 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France was razed in one afternoon by a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division searching for résistants and 643 of its inhabitants were murdered – the men were shot in groups and burned, while the women and children were herded into the village church and burned alive when the SS set fire to the building. Only one woman, who managed to climb out of a window in the sacristy, and six men managed to escape the carnage.
And as of January 1945 when the Nazis realized the end of the war was near and they were losing, they tried in many cases to destroy the evidence of their crime and either killed all surviving prisoners on the spot or left the sick to fend for themselves and die and evacuated the ones who might still be able to work on “death marches” towards camps in the interior of the Reich, during which many prisoners died of mistreatment, exhaustion and exposure or were killed by their guards if they could not continue to walk. Some of these prisoners were rescued whenever the Allied forces came upon such marches. Others were rescued from the camps themselves when the latter were liberated.
Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. The Romani call it the Porajmos (“The Devouring”) or Pharrajimos (“The Cutting-Up”, “The Destruction”). Holocaust, which we use in English, derives from the Greek word holókauston which means “burnt whole.” The Holocaust and the unspeakable atrocities and devastation it wreaked on the Jewish community and other communities and individuals in Europe must not be forgotten and its extension to other peoples and countries must not be forgotten, either. The actual scope of the killing almost beggars belief. The Nazis didn’t even have any scruples about killing their own people: in November 1944, they introduced the notion of “kin liability” in which the families of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers were threatened with execution outright if these soldiers deserted.
I don’t think anyone who was not there at the time can accurately describe the unspeakable things that were done by the Nazis, not just to whomever they deemed “non-Aryans” but to any people they felt were “threats” to their power – which they varnished as “national and racial purity” – or just out of base and gratuitous cruelty towards members of ethnic groups, scientific and scholarly associations, civic, religious and fraternal groups or individual people whose lifestyles they just plain didn’t like. There are many, many excellent documents, books, studies and cinematographic works on the topic.
Among of the best of these, in my opinion, and one that hit me the hardest – not that the others don’t hit hard – is the late French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour 1985 documentary “Shoah”. This documentary came out more than a generation ago. How many have seen the entire film recently, if at all? Yet it is among the key documentary works about this shameful period. Most of it is told by survivors. All of it is gut-wrenching.
One of the many parts of this documentary that is burned into my heart is when one survivor explains how people with particular skills were considered useful and allowed to live. Musicians were selected on arrival and spared to form groups to entertain the German officers in the camp on pleasant evenings, or even stood out in the cold to play so the music would help “keep the peace” in the camps. Cobblers repaired shoes for the camp, including the best of the shoes taken from wealthiest prisoners who had been interned and/or executed so these shoes could be sent to Germany and resold. You’ve all seen the photos of the pile of shoes or the glasses or the suitcases at the Auschwitz Museum. Trust me, the view of them in real life leaps shrieking into your mind and never leaves.
The survivor telling this story was a barber. Barbers and hairdressers were employed to shave the prisoners’ heads and bodies. This was more to humiliate them than to actually prevent lice. The hair of women who had long locks was carefully set aside to make wigs for sale to the wealthy Nazi leaders’ wives. That is what this barber had to do. He explained he always tried to do his best and be respectful so the women would feel appreciated. He knew, and they knew, that most of the time these women would be sent to the gas chambers; some were used in pseudo-scientific experimentation, some were abused, and others worked to the extreme limit of their health and sanity.
Then one day, his own wife of many years, who had been sent to the camp with him but imprisoned in the women’s camp, sat in his barber’s chair. He gently shaved her head, and reassured her how beautiful she was. He never saw her again.
Why is it important to remember the Shoah, or any other of the genocidal acts that have taken place over history and are still happening – from Anglesey to Verden, from persecuted Huguenots to Belfast, Mystic and Sand Creek and Olowalu, Armenia, Queensland and Van Diemen’s Land, Guernica and Oradour-sur-Glane, Gnadenhutten and Tulsa, Hispaniola, Cambodia, Bosnia… to the Tutsis and Yemenites and Yazidis and Rohingyas, and too many others to mention in one writing? It’s important because all of them are part of our collective memory and because collectively, humanity should learn and do better and be better. Forgetting leads to denial. Denial or ignorance of history inevitably leads to it repeating itself, and ill-minded, autocratic people are still out there and ready to exploit that.
Whenever we see a commemorative day, we should stop and think about why it is important and what we are supposed to take away from it and learn and apply and demand of our elected officials. It doesn’t take going out and making speeches to stand up against hate and injustice. We can do that every day in our simplest acts.
I hope you will visit the museum websites and, if you can and have not yet done so, visit in person someday. I also hope you will stay mindful. Remember that the Shoah was concocted and released by an unimposing little man that a lot of folks made fun of and disregarded in the beginning yet who found a way to capture, exacerbate, exploit and weaponize people’s racist and xenophobic fears, personal resentments, misconceptions, cupidity, and nationalist sentiment and used that power to develop and implement some of the most violently evil policies the world has ever known.
He was able to do that because he was supported just as much by like-minded people who saw their personal gain in it as by those who simply didn’t bother to care.
Further informational links:
Holocaust Encyclopedia
The United States Memorial Holocaust Museum:
https://www.ushmm.org/
Twitter: @HolocaustMuseum
The Auschwitz Museum:
www.auschwitz.org/en/
Twitter: @AuschwitzMuseum
Solperstein project:
http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/
Till next time. Stay safe, wash your hands, keep your distance, wear your mask, and don’t give up before the miracle.
MLW