Dublin Opinion

In his essay, Pink triangle, Yellow Star Gore Vidal tells the story of what happened when Christopher Isherwood, when arguing with a young Jewish movie producer about the Holocaust, tried to argue that the Nazi’s murder of Homosexuals was as significant as that of Jews:

“In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood, “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”

The point being, I imagined when I read it first years ago, was that although the tendency is to focus on the suffering of the largest group who were victimised by the Nazis, we should not forget the scale of the devastation to whole swaths of humanity who, for one reason or another, got on the wrong side of the hungry, ideologically-driven war machine of The Third Reich.

I was reminded of this while reading a well written and sensitive piece published in the Irish Times (sub req) to commemorate the anniversary of the Holocaust, which only came to my attention, I’ll admit, because it was written by a friend of a friend.

While visiting the open exhibition at Auschwitz Mr. Fleming describes what has become, perhaps, a common enough symbol of the incontrovertable fact that so many lives were cut violently short – those mounds of ordinary items that are the paraphernalia of the living; the accoutrements of everyday existence.

“In the first building, there are several swimming pool-sized displays. Tooth brushes. Hair brushes. Shaving brushes. Tens of thousands of them.

Then there are suitcases - each with the name and origin of its owner. There are shoes; then children’s shoes.

By the time you stare at a mountain of artificial limbs and medical corsets, you understand these exhibits are relics of unsainted martyrs, banal fragments of terminated ordinary lives.”

There is no doubt that once we are reminded of this connection to ordinary life; lives with which we can feel an association, there is less chance that we will start to sanitize the event as a cold historical fact, rendering it merely as material for text book history.

John Fleming believes these images should be shown everywhere:

“Photographs of Auschwitz should be taken over and over. The mound of spectacles, the walking canes, the artificial hands: these images should be printed, e-mailed and sent by mobile phone. They should appear in newspapers, websites and books.

Lest… we forget”.

Yet, I begin to wonder if such accounts and images become simply part of an annual or once a decade ritual where we find ourselves going through the motions, looking at the mound of glasses, seeing the children’s shoes and trying to feel the horror.

Almost inevitably the piece ends with, what I thought, was a banal platitude:

“Lest - despite Rwanda, the Balkans, the Congo, Chechnya and far too many other occasions of human horror - we forget that people like you and me are capable of murdering people like you and me.”

As the list suggests we are no nearing understanding why such mass murder happens, or is allowed to happen. Aside of course, from the rather obvious fact that people have always killed other people and the reason why is usually extreme competition over resources. It’s easier to steal from someone if they’re dead. What makes it so difficult to comprehend though, is the scale of that murder.

However, it was the title of the piece, the blackly ironic motto “Work Sets You Free” or Arbeit Macht Frei, which appeared on the gates of Auschwitz that got me thinking.

And the reason it got me thinking was because of the chapter Labour, Food, Genocide in the excellent book Wages of Destruction – The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze which showed that to The Third Reich notions of Work and Genocide were more closely connected than one would automatically think. This chapter deals with the contradictory situation in 1942 where huge numbers of foreign workers from the occupied territories were recruited, sometimes by force, to replace native German armaments workers who were either fighting or had already been killed (often in numbers of staggering proportions) while at the same time ordering the murder of millions of able bodied Jewish men and women who could have worked just as well in those factories.

By putting the German war effort and analysing the ideological desire to kill along racial lines in an economic context Tooze shows that this apparent contradiction actually made sense. The problem for the Nazi economy was that the plan to transform Germany through war was never going to work. He shows that the seeds of its own destruction were sown as early as 1934, when The Third Reich suppressed the inherent problems within the economy as a result of a global economic crisis by turning all the resources available within it towards one single effort – to rearm. This fixation with rearmament sucked up everything else.

The plan had been to avoid the starvation that came about during World War I in Germany, which brought about the rise of civil discontent within the German population, by taking the food available in the newly won occupied territories and pouring it into Germany. However, there was a problem.

If they were to going to have to recruit millions of foreign workers or use Soviet prisoner of war to continue with the German war effort they were going to have to feed them. If they did not feed them enough, they wouldn’t have the strength to work efficiently enough to meet the demands of the war effort. And if they did not have the strength to work they became a liability – so called ‘useless eaters’, who required just enough food to survive but not enough to be productive. From the point of view of the Nazi executive it was better to let them starve to death – which prior to the reorganization of food distribution in 1942 is what they did to many of those who had been brought into the country to work.

In Physics, Work is defined as the unit of energy used to accelerate a body with a mass of one kilogram using one newton of force over a distance of one meter.

The unit energy required to do that work is one joule. In an ergonomics text book on the Web there is an interesting table showing the amount of Kilojoules required to complete several different types of heavy work:

Without the nutrients required to generate these kilojoules such work can’t be done.

So, in 1942 the executive decided to support those who wanted to feed the foreign workers in order to make them productive while also keeping the SS happy by continuing apace with the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. It did this by demanding that the government of occupied Poland, the so called “General Government”, turn over a huge amount of its own food to be used by the German population. If any one was to suffer as a result of this action the Jews should be first.

As Richard J Evans says in his New York Review of Books article on Toozes book:

“Killing millions of able-bodied Jews hardly seemed rational at a time of increasingly desperate manpower shortages in the German economy. Tooze argues that the idea of “annihilation through labor” was a compromise between the SS, who wanted to kill all the Jews, and economic and political leaders who wanted to make use of those judged fit for work. In practice, of course, the latter were a very small proportion of the whole. Tooze suggests that at the Wannsee conference early in 1942, arranged to coordinate the logistics of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe,” as the Nazis euphemistically put it, Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, in the chair, “referred neither to gassing nor shooting as a means of disposing of the Jewish populations of Poland or Western Europe. Instead, he proposed that they should be evacuated eastward in giant construction columns,” and used on the building of roads.

But in fact the minutes of the meeting identified two and a half million Jews who lived in the “General Government” part of occupied Poland as unfit for work. Nobody present at the conference was left in any doubt that they were to be killed. Goebbels recorded in his diary that around 40 percent of the Jews were to be used on construction schemes. From the outset, however, they were kept on inadequate rations, beaten, housed in desperately unsanitary conditions, and generally regarded as expendable, as, to an only slightly lesser degree, were the foreign workers who were now brought into the German economy in growing numbers.”

This, of course, does not completely explain the reasons why the Nazis would want to murder the Jews. However, it does help to explain that a government that was capable of purposely starving millions of Russians and those from other European countries simply because they were not German would have no compunction when it came to murdering Jews, who they irrationally considered be a blight on their existence and who had been allowed to become so malnurioused were actually more costly to keep alive.

Why did they ever believe it would work. Perhaps because they believed that having a strong enough army was all that was needed to bring the world to its knees. Based on the premise of the overwhelming strength of a single nation the Nazis believed that when it came to achieving the supremacy of the Aryan Nation, the lives of others didn’t matter.

And today I read this:

“Hungry people in the slums of Haiti are giving new meaning to the phrase ‘dirt poor.’ As food prices soar, many desperate people are eating mud cookies to stave off their hunger pangs…;” Jonathan M. Katz, AP, January 29, 2008, quote from AP photo gallery by Ariana Cubillos).

One thing Rudy Giuliani did after losing the Florida primary was give a speech with the line “The best way to achieve peace is through overwhelming strength.”

That could have been said by the rulers of colonial France as they tore the gold from Haiti’s mountains, or by Thomas Jefferson as he warned against tolerating Haiti’s slave uprising. Or by the US rulers of the ’50s through ’80s as they backed the Duvaliers as Haiti’s dictators, or of the ’90s as they backed the FRAPH death squad and imposed a World Bank/IMF plan on Haiti that — a decade before Wednesay’s dirt- consumption update — began making Haitians hungrier. […]

Giuliani’s statement was not peculiar. McCain says things like that all the time, and it was the Clinton administration, where Hillary worked, that produced the 20-year Pentagon plan for “Full-spectrum Dominance,” i.e. the ability “to defeat any adversary and control any situation,” anywhere, anytime (Jim Garamore, American Forces Press Service [US Department of Defense], “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” June 2, 2000).

And then this:

“Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less inevitable, China, India, and some of the oil-producing countries are in a very strong countertrend. As a result, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other developing countries. The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession – or worse.”

Mr. Soros is just trying to frighten us, of course. So, what’s my point? I don’t know what my point is.