HOLOCAUST

The word holocaust is derived from the biblical Greek term holocauston, meaning a "burnt offering" made in sacrifice to God. The term came to be widely used in the early 1970s to refer to the mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers of an organized system of death camps initiated by German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and the Nazi Party during World War II. In the 1980s, some scholars argued that the word holocaust imputed more meaning to the event than it deserved and began calling it the Shoah, a Hebrew term referring to a time of desolation. The connotations of the latter have come to color even the meaning of the former.

In World War II nearly 30 million people died in combat or as random civilian victims of war. History is filled with wars and massacres, but genocide is something else. While the Turkish attempt to eliminate the Armenians (c. 1915) may be an earlier example of genocide, the Holocaust has come to be described as the archetypal example. Genocide is a systematic, state-sponsored, bureaucratically organized attempt to eliminate an entire people (usually identified in "racial," ethnic, or religious terms) from the face of the earth, not for any strategic military or political advantage but simply because they exist. The Nazi attack on the Jews was not an attempt to eliminate a foreign enemy but its own Jewish citizens first and then all the Jews in Europe. While others were also made victims in the death camps (such as the mentally retarded, homosexuals, and communists), the Jews and Gypsies were the only two peoples targeted for total annihilation. Thousands of Gypsies and 6 million Jews were murdered. A third of the world's Jews and two-thirds of Europe's Jews died in the Holocaust.

In the Nazi genocidal project, science was used to provide a biological theory of race that offered ideological justification for genocidal public policies of racial purity, and technology was used to provide the most efficient means to carry out these policies.

Science

The Nazis used English naturalist Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) biological theory of evolution to justify their program of genocide. Darwin posited the evolutionary differentiation of species as the product of "natural selection" in which only those organisms most successful in adapting themselves to a particular ecological niche survive to reproduce themselves and so shape the gene pool. This law of competition came to be known as the "survival of the fittest," meaning the survival of those most successful at adaptation.

In the nineteenth century this scientific theory was transformed into a political ideology known as "social Darwinism" by metaphorically extending Darwin's biological theory into the realm of society. In this way social phenomena such as class conflict or the conflict between nations were imagined to operate by the same laws of "natural selection." It seemed only "natural" to the Nazis to conclude that the ascendancy of the Nazi German nation-state was the outcome of a biological process in which the fittest race had survived to dominate all others, proving the superiority of the Aryan race. The greatest threat to this evolutionary outcome was, in their view, racial pollution—the biological mixing with "inferior races" that would weaken the purity of Aryan blood.

As Robert Jay Lifton (1986) noted, the death camps were viewed as public health projects in which the Jews were considered a cancerous growth on the body of the Aryan race, threatening its organic health (i.e., racial purity), and so had to be cut out in order to restore the body to health. It was no accident that physicians were required to fill the role of those who selected some victims for the work camps while sending others directly to the gas chambers. The doctor, as an elite scientifically trained professional, gave an aura of "scientific" legitimacy to the entire genocidal enterprise, and the "scientific theory" of racial purity gave the doctors a rationalization that allowed them to think of killing as a form of healing.

The Nazis had to ideologically twist science to justify their genocidal actions. Biologically all human beings are capable of interbreeding and therefore constitute a single species: There is only one human race. The Nazi "theory" of races was an ideological myth. Moreover, Darwin's theory suggested that it was genetic diversity not genetic uniformity that promoted survival. Finally, "survival of the fittest" had descriptive rather than normative status in Darwin's theory.

Technology

A technological civilization is one shaped by bureaucracies of technical experts who organize society to accomplish all its tasks using the most efficient solutions that science can discover. Richard Rubenstein (1975) notes that the turning point in the Nazi genocidal program occurred in reaction to Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass, November 9–10, 1938), when Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), head of the Gestapo, the German secret police, rejected and suppressed the further use of mob violence that been promoted by Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), German minister of propaganda. Himmler recognized that the only way to efficiently organize mass death was to remove the element of personal emotion and replace it with the cool and efficient operations of the impersonal techno-bureaucratic procedures that typified the death camps.

As the Holocaust well demonstrates, techno-bureaucratic organization is impervious to ethical considerations, because bureaucracy separates ends and means. When persons choose both ends and means they feel the connection in their experience out of which a sense of personal responsibility can emerge. But in a bureaucracy, those higher up are viewed as being in a better position to choose the ends than the technical experts, lower down in the hierarchy, who are charged with developing the means to accomplish them. The Nazi doctors who did the selections in the death camps saw themselves as mere cogs in a complex bureaucratic machine. Even if one refused to participate that would change nothing. Like a replaceable part, one doctor would simply be substituted for by another, more accommodating one. These doctors did not feel responsible because the victims were dead long before they ever got to the camps, declared so by those higher up in the bureaucracy who alone had the authority and responsibility. Indeed, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials that followed World War II (1945–1949) demonstrated the prevalence of this logic in the repeated defense of those accused who plead non-responsibility because they were "just following orders."

Ethics after the Holocaust

The Nuremberg trials, by identifying "crimes against humanity" for prosecution, represent an initial attempt to think globally about ethics. Indeed, the horror of the atrocities of World War II sent a global moral shock through the human race that led to the creation of the first global ethic in history. For the movement for human rights arose in response to the trauma of the Holocaust and the other atrocities of World War II. This movement culminated in the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1946 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN in 1948. The preamble to the declaration recalls the "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind," preparing the way for the declaration's main body, which strongly affirms the unity of humanity. Consequently this document stands against all ideologies that would divide humanity, racially or otherwise, in order to claim the world and its resources for some superior volk—as the Nazis attempted to do.

Unlike the technical and esoteric language of most academic treatises on ethics, human rights language is a language that has spontaneously taken root in cross-cultural public discourse. The language of human rights has become embedded in the language of politics and international relations. Even if, in many cases, the political use of this language is hypocritical, still that is the homage that vice pays to virtue, which means that human rights can be used as a measuring rod for cross-cultural social and political criticism.

Moreover, in the aftermath of World War II, a plethora of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations committed to preserving and protecting the rights of all human beings across all religions and cultures has emerged, deeply influencing global social policies. Such organizations include the UN itself, especially its Commission on Human Rights and its various subcommissions, as well as the International Court of Justice and regional conventions on human rights in Western Europe, the United States, and Africa. Then there are the governmental offices of individual nations that monitor each other for rights violations and use this information to political advantage. (Motivations of self-interest aside, this political game does keep the pressure on to observe human rights.) Finally, there are nongovernmental voluntary associations committed to human rights such as Amnesty International, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as religious organizations, labor organizations, and professional associations.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Holocaust or Shoah has become a symbol for the universal call to conscience and responsibility on behalf of the human dignity and human rights of all. In this context the rhetoric of the Holocaust and of human rights, as one might expect, has often become politicized and sometimes trivialized. And yet the moral climate of human history has been unarguably changed by the language of "human rights" and "human dignity" evolving into the global moral language of accountability and by the Holocaust becoming a powerful symbol of everything that would violate such dignity and rights.

DARRELL J. FASCHING

SEE ALSO Arendt, Hannah;Dignity;Eugenics;Human Rights; Judaism;Levi, Primo;Nazi Medicine;Race;Social Darwinism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fasching, Darrell J. (1993). The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? Albany: State University of New York Press. A study of the emergence of global ethics and its role in shaping public policy after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Lifton, Robert Jay. (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic. A ground-breaking study of the psychological and institutional factors that together shaped the genocidal mentality of the Nazi doctors in the death camps.

Roth, John, ed. (1999). Ethics after the Holocaust. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. An excellent collection of essays by scholars from diverse countries on ethics after the Holocaust.

Rubenstein, Richard. (1975). The Cunning of History. New

York: Harper and Row. A brilliant and devastating study of the role of scientific and technical bureaucracies in facilitating the Holocaust.