Red Cushion

Jewish Holocaust - (A review of Alex Grobman's PBS documentary on Hitler.)


Alex Grobman begins in sharing a few key facts. The Jews alone were singled out for total annihilation. There was no master plan to kill all of the Poles, Czechs, Gypsies, or any other group. Grobman further notes that the approximently Ten Thousand Polish intelligensia and Catholic priesthood killed from 1939 to 1940 in Western Poland was to prevent these groups from becoming a political and spiritual force that could unite the nation against the Nazi’s. When the Nazi’s murdered Two-and-a-half million Russian prisoner’s-of-war, they were killing a military force that had fought them on the field of battle.

Grobman points out that the European Jews were different. To the Nazi leadership, Grobmen observes, the Jews were a satanic force controlling both the East and West, and posed a threat to the German nation. The Nazi’s felt that the only way to put an end to this “Jewish conspiracy” was to physically destroy every Jewish man, woman, and child. Hitler is quoted as saying that the failure to do so “would not lead to a Versailles treaty, but the final destruction, indeed, to the annihilation of the German People.”

Gobman further illuminates the ideology of the German hierarchy in quoting the head of the German “SS” troops, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler said that he did not feel “Justified in getting rid of the (Jewish) men… in having them put to death… only to allow their children to grow up and avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons… This race must be wiped off of the Earth.”
Grobman states that in order to further understand the difference between what happened to the Jews and non-Jews is to distinguish between the words “Genocide” and “Holocaust.” Raphael Lemkin, who coined the phrase “Genocide” said that a policy of the German system and program was one “of depopulation, promoting procreation by Germans in the occupied areas, introducing a starvation rationing system for non-Germans, and mass killings, mostly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes, and Russians.” Grobman interjects that this held true for most of Europe, but the Germans program for the Jews was different in that the Jews were “selectively murdered.” Grobman offers in support of his view in that non-Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were kept alive to assist in the building of the Third Reich.

Grobman continues in noting that since the Jews did not hare the same fate as the other Europeans, a different word was needed in referring to the phenomenon. Thus came the word “Holocaust”, or “Shoah.” Grobman shares the thoughts of Henry Feingold in stating that the isolation of what happened to the Jews isn’t to cause a “contest to measure pain or degree’s of victimization… what is measured is the importance (and impact) of the event in history… the holocaust is an entirely different order of events in terms of its historical weight. History is not democratic; it does not assign equal import to like events. To forget that difference… is to risk losing the possibility of retrieving some meaning from the event.” Grobman further states that the meaning is found in its specificity rather that in what it shares with other events.
Grobman feels that focusing on the unique position of the Jews in the holocaust would help in learning much about the nature of western civilization. Grobman notes, that the European Jews by virtue of “its thinkers” such as Einstein, Freud, Marx, Kafka, and Proust were not a dissent minority, but an important component of the pre-holocaust Europe. Grobman points out the irony that the Jews were destroyed by a perverse use of an industrial process that had become a hallmark of modernity throughout the industrialized world.

Grobman states that the holocaust raises the question of whether civilization will accept the existence of minority groups in its midst as distinct entities with their own group consciousness. While he feels that the Jews have survived anti-Semitism, he questions as to whether “the west can survive it’s persisting nature.” He notes that films about the holocaust and holocaust era films such as Genocide compel us to learn from the past, though do not intend to engender hate or prejudice towards other nations and groups. Protestant theologian, Franklin Littell, as quoted by Grobman suggests that our study of the holocaust be as a social pathologist studying a “sick society” in order to discover how people of every class of German society participated in the destruction process. Other Jews who did so without being forced to do so “by any external threat” did so because it was part of their job. It is noted by Christopher Browning that an internal compulsion on the part of the participating Jews was to maintain an unstained record, thus blotting out any sense of individual responsibility, as “they became dehumanized.”

Grobman was frightened by an assertion by Himmler that the people involved with the annihilation of the Jews had remained decent, creating a tougher society, to serve as a “never-to-be-written, glorious page in German history.” Grobman stresses that if we allow the holocaust to be treated as unwritten, we will never be able to sensitize “our fellow citizens” to the dangers inherent within the “western culture.” He notes that with our civil bureaucracy, advancements in technology, science, and business, centralized government, and highly trained police and military provides us with the capability of destruction comparable to the holocaust. In his final statement, Grobman expresses unsurity as to whether “Auschwitz has become an external warning, or merely the first station on the road to the extermination of all races and the suicide of humanity.”