Monsters or ordinary people?

GRAHAM FORST

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010), the recently published book by the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder, tells the story of the deliberate, non-combat murder by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of 14 million innocent citizens in the “killing fields” of Europe – the zone of death between Berlin and Moscow. It’s an enormous, meticulously documented book that has been universally acclaimed and has immediately found its way into Holocaust studies curricula in North America, England and Germany.

Snyder is a first-class historian; his methods are assiduous and his knowledge thorough. But at the end of Bloodlands, he draws a conclusion that should give pause to all Jews, certainly, and, to be sure, to everyone interested in Holocaust history.

Snyder’s conclusion mainly focuses on the Nazis. His point is this: we must not look back at the Holocaust and “demonize” the Nazis, but rather, try to understand that what they did, after all, did in fact “make sense to them.” Theirs was a “kind of devotion”; the Nazis, whatever else can be said about them, had a “capacity for faith” and an “access to ethical thinking” which, in the end, “made them human,” Snyder writes.

In other words, we don’t want to exonerate the Nazis, but neither must we make moral monsters out of them. According to Snyder, this kind of thinking puts us off-guard, blinding us to our own potential for evil.

For me, this kind of thinking is so full of holes, it is, in essence, “all hole.” The fact that these murderers “had access to ethical thinking” doesn’t de-demonize them; quite the contrary. Had they no such access, that is, were they, say, brought up in Skinner boxes, well, we might get the point. But exactly how does the murder of one and a half million babies “make sense” in any sense, especially if you “had access to ethical thinking”? You can only allow this kind of rationale if you accept the “Fuhrer orders” defence made at the Nuremburg trials, or if you accept the notion of the irresistibility of propaganda in general.

The opposite position, which is no less persuasive than Snyder’s, is simply this: the Nazis were deliberate militarists and plunderers who enjoyed and/or profited from what they did, masking their greed and pleasure behind “our duty to the Fuhrer.”

In other words, Snyder, in striving to ensure that we don’t come to a glib “I could never have done that,” tries to persuade the reader that the Nazis were also humans, just like us, driven by ideals, trying to do their best for their country and for their personal and social futures.

I say, “No.” And, ironically, Snyder’s own mountain of collected evidence that proves that the Nazis were not simply “misguided idealists.” Rather, they clearly and intentionally followed an evil path, a path they blazed themselves – and then ended up owning the house next door. What a coincidence.

One must never underestimate the evil of Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann. Why? Because, in spite of what Snyder writes, they knew better and chose not to know. Eichmann, memorably, called himself a disciple of Emmanuel Kant (whose moral philosophy turns on a variation of the “Golden Rule”) but (as reported by Hanna Arendt) admitted to the judge at his trial that he had at one point “ceased to act within Kantian principles and knew it.”

So, it seems, what “made sense” to the Nazis were not moral ideals or even mass murder as an end in itself, but mass murder as a justification for looting and psychopathic jouissance. (This, by the way, was the opinion of the late Vancouver resident Rudolf Vrba, survivor of Auschwitz and co-author of the Auschwitz Report.)

In a word, there is no excusing the Nazis. They “had access” to ethical thinking, no less than do you or I, and chose to ignore it. Mass murder did not, could not possibly “make sense” to them; rather, they freely chose to believe that which they knew to be wrong for their own malicious and avaricious purposes.

Maybe historians should not draw conclusions, but just state the facts, do the research, lay out the timelines. That’s their purview, after all. For when Snyder exchanges his historian’s hat at the end of his book (the last chapter of which is called, somewhat immodestly, “Humanity”) and becomes a philosopher, he’s over his head, and the whole point of his research becomes lost in a cloud of bad ethics.

Jean-Paul Sartre had a phrase for hiding personal motives behind masks of rationalization: he called it mauvais foi, that is, bad faith. For this kind of faith, I agree, the Nazis had an infinite capacity.

Dr. Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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