Auschwitz Read Free Page A

orchestrated to a large extent by Nazi storm troopers. There was also a boycott of Jewish businesses (supported by Goebbels, an ardent anti-Semite), but this only lasted for one day.
    The Nazi leaders were concerned about public opinion both at home and abroad—in particular they didn’t want their anti-Semitism to make Germany a pariah state. Two more anti-Semitic upsurges—one in 1936 with the advent of the Nuremberg Laws withdrawing citizenship from German Jews, and the second in 1938 with the burning of synagogues and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Jews at the time of Kristallnacht—marked the other significant pre-war moments in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. But, overall, the pace of Nazi anti-Semitic policy was gradual, and many Jews tried to stick out life in Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s. Nazi propaganda against the Jews (with the exception of fringe fanatics like Julius Streicher and his outrageous anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer ) proceeded at Goebbels’ speed of the slowest vessel in the convoy, with neither of the overtly anti-Semitic films, Der ewige Jude or Jud Süss , shown until after the war had begun.
    This notion that the Nazis proceeded incrementally against the Jews goes against the understandable desire to point to a single moment when one crucial decision was made for the “Final Solution” and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But this history is not so easily resolved. The decisions that led to the sophistication of a killing technique that delivered families to their deaths by a railway link which stopped only meters from the crematoria, took years to evolve. The Nazi regime was one that practised what one historian famously called “cumulative radicalization,” 7 whereby each decision often led to a crisis which led to a still more radical decision.
    The most obvious example of how events could spiral into catastrophe was the food crisis in the Łódź ghetto in the summer of 1941—a situation that led one Nazi functionary to ask whether the most “humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not fit for work by means of some quick-working device.” 8 Thus, the idea of extermination is offered up out of “humanity.” It should be remembered, of course, that it was the policies of the Nazi leadership that had created the food crisis in the Łödź ghetto in the first place.
    This does not mean that Hitler was not to blame for the crime—he undoubtedly
was—but he was responsible in a more sinister way than simply calling his subordinates together on one particular day and forcing the decision upon them. All of the leading Nazis knew that their Führer prized one quality in policy making above all others—radicalism. Hitler once said that he wanted his generals to be like “dogs straining on a leash” (and in this they most often failed him). His love of radicalism, plus his technique of encouraging massive competition within the Nazi leadership by often appointing two people to do more or less the same job, meant that there was intense dynamism in the political and administrative system—plus intense inherent instability. Everyone knew how much Hitler hated the Jews, everyone heard his 1939 speech in the Reichstag during which he predicted the “extermination” of the European Jews if they “caused” a world war, and so everyone in the Nazi leadership knew the type of policy towards the Jews to suggest—the more radical the better.
    Hitler was massively preoccupied with one task during World War II: trying to win it. He spent much less time on the Jewish question than on the intricacies of military strategy. His attitude to Jewish policy is likely to have been similar to the instructions he gave to the Gauleiters of Danzig, West Prussia, and the Warthegau when he told them he wanted their areas Germanized, and once they had accomplished the