History makes very clear that the Nazis caused the Holocaust with their racist ideology of treating people they considered inferior worse than animals.
History also makes clear that the method used to commit this genocide was swapping water for toxic gas in the showers of various death camps.
There is a type of war history revision that claims the Holocaust never happened which is clearly hugely problematic because it is highly disrespectful of the memory of the tens of millions of innocent people who were murdered in the Holocaust.
But there is another revision I never see expressed which in no way questions the Holocaust, which there is no question happened, but rather it asks who exactly was responsible for it. I do not have enough time to make this hugely comprehensive but the argument is simple. Let me review some simple uncontroversial facts.
(1) The main cause of death in the Holocaust was starvation. All the images we see of the Holocaust are pictures of horrendously emaciated survivors and piles of utterly starved corpses. We know that the "showers" was not used on starving people but were for new captives. These starved people died from starvation.
(2) Britain was struggling with starvation during the war. One of Germany's strategies--indeed a central military strategy in any war--was to try and besiege England. Even with the huge global empire trying to send in supplies Britain struggled with food. Every ounce of land was dug up and turned into farm land and yet we still had rationing for many years even after the war ended.
(3) Of course Britain used exactly the same strategy for Germany, which was much easier after Hitlers failed attempt to capture the Russian grain belt in Ukraine and the gradual cutting off of ties to any allies. By the end of the war Germany had no food. Tied in with hyper-inflation of the Mark, from emergency quantitative easing, everyone in Germany was starving by 1945.
So we know that prisoners in the concentration camps would have been starving by 1945 simply from Allied actions alone regardless what the Nazis did. But that is by itself proof of nothing, it simply points out that the war had these people doomed even if they survived the Nazis.
(4) We also know that the system of concentration camps was set up early in the 1930s. There were well in excess of 1000 such camps. At the time the German logic was to recall "Germans" to the Fatherland from the parts of the Empire they lost in WW1. In turn they made room for them by imprisoning "non-German" people. In Nazi logic Germans belonged in Germany, and non-Germans were inferior people who were best employed as slaves. Its shocking to see this in Europe in the 20th Century but its the same idea we see across the ancient world. Even in "modern" Democratic Athens 90% of the population were slaves, and only the Athenian men were allowed to vote. Germany also had an unpayable debt to pay to the Allies after WW1 and it was the economic reforms and creation of work camps that enabled them to create and economic surplus. In addition Europe wasn't complaining in the 1930s, itself suffering from the US Great Depression fallout, and the cheap slave made goods from Germany were very welcome. Germany indeed was the slave of Europe, and inside Germany they made "non-Germans" into slaves, people such as Russians, Polish and most famously Jews. The thing to note here is that for over 10 years there was no Holocaust just slave camps and "sweat shops" with people being offered for cheap labour and hire in places like Mercedes-Benz and Pfizer. Officially the Holocaust began just before D-Day and the start of the Allied invasion of Germany in 1942. Suddenly Germans racist policies switched from slave labour to extermination.
(5)There is another "fact" that I heard from someone who had studied International Peace Keeping and in particular the huge humanitarian problem that faces relief efforts after wars. Few people speak of it but liberation of the Concentration Camps and Death Camps was not the end of the war for the prisoners. They were obscenely malnourished. If we imagine that Germany completely ran out of food in early 1945 these people would have seen no meal at all for months. The Allies were faced with a problem never seen before of how to feed so many millions of starving people. The extraordinary "fact" is that more prisoners died after the end of the war than during or before. In the unmarked mass burials we see being filled by bulldozers in film, there are more people who died in freedom than in captivity.
This all points to the utterly devastating impact of the Allied invasion of Germany on not only the German people, but also the Holocaust victims. It is not a question of whether the Allies contributed to the Holocaust, but rather how much.
Full disclosure. As a pacifist I am biased toward the view that war does not achieve beneficial outcomes for anyone. Clearly it doesn't benefit the victims of war on either side, and it is hard to find anyone who isn't scarred by the experience of war. But the unspeakable horror of empires fighting it out in WW2 is always overshadowed by the idea that we ended Nazi horrors. But there is no doubt that most of the Nazis horrors are actually war horrors, horrors of starvation and deprivation, and indeed before the war the Nazi horrors were the still no less horrifying, but more "recognisable" imprisonment of people in slave labour.
I say "recognisable" because of course the USA was built by slaves and slaves were only freed across the country after the civil war was fought to free them in 1865. That means there were men retiring in Germany as the concentration camps were being set up who were born while there were still slaves in the US. It has taken all of human history to end slavery, and it is still a relatively recent thing. I personally wonder whether it was the arrival of the steam engine and even cheaper labour than that provided by humans that really motivated the switch from human to machine we see start during the 18th Century.
It is often argued that WW2 was a copy of the American Civil War and was fought by the Allies who opposed slavery against the Axis who wanted slavery. But there is one inconvenient truth that rather clouds these noble histories we have. The Bengal Famine of 1943.
In 1943 the UK was at the height of its war effort to defeat Germany, and Germany had its U-Boats criss-crossing the Atlantic and North Sea in a desperate bid to try and cut off Britain's supplies and starve the country. Food from all around the British empire was being sent home to support the war effort. And then Bengal's harvest failed. For a year Churchill, his mind beset by a desire to crush German, ignored the plight of the Indians and continued to order the export of food from Bengal
to Britain. Millions died. The reports started to come back to a horrified public of gentlemen having to step over the piled up bodies of dead Indians outside their clubs. Public protest eventually persuaded Churchill to stop and reverse some exports to aid the humanitarian disaster, but not before his exasperated statement that the "Indians deserved it for breeding like rabbits." You can sympathise with him at one level that his war effort was being upset by an unexpected catastrophe thousands of miles away that he hadn't banked on. But it takes a particular type of cold heart to keep looking away that long from a problem. Churchill hated Indians, he viewed them as a subordinate race. It was not such a rare sentiment before the end of WW2.
So now we look at Germany in exactly the same situation. They have millions of slaves, not thousands of miles away, but cooped up behind wire in camps across Germany and Poland. And they work these camps to exporting supplies for a war effort. Food starts to run scarce and like Churchill they have no choice but to keep working them and starving them to keep the war effort going. Unlike Britain however Germany was losing the war, and didn't have a huge empire to turn to to feed its starving people. After the camps starved the rest of Germany soon followed.
Given this it looks rather possible to me that the Holocaust the Hitler really caused was actually the Bengal Famine of 1943. He forced Churchill to mercilessly exploit the Bengalis for their food. True Churchill hated Indians, but I doubt he had a heart so cold that he would not have felt compassion for them under normal circumstances. And in contrast it is Churchill who caused the German Holocaust. He forced Hitler to exploit his slaves to death, and starved Germany of the food needed to support them. True that Hitler hated these people, but we know that before the war there were no exterminations, so we can assume without a war he would have continued to run his slave camps until perhaps such time as Germany had a economic surplus by means other than slavery. But this is pure unprovable speculation.
There is then an argument, of great interest to me, that had WW2 not been fought then no-one needed to die. No one needed to lose their father, or mother, or children. No one needed to see their house destroyed, or the historic country become annihilated. No one needed these horror and these memories. Indeed had WW1 not been fought Germany may never have needed to build concentration camps and create a slave class to fuel its crushed economy. It is my personal conviction that when ever war is avoided we have selected the correct leaders, and we have chosen the path of peace and happiness. But when ever our leaders choose war we have made a grave error in selecting them and have committed ourselves much sorry and hardship. In this Churchill as the main architect of the war actually stands above Hitler. But between them they share the blame for the deaths of 1 in 30 people of all humanity at the time. And this is the gravest mistake mankind has ever made electing these people (although Churchill rather surprisingly was not even elected!)
What remains then after this account is the Other Holocaust, the infamous one, the one metered out with Germanic precision in the hellish Death Camps after 1942. There is no question that this horror is a scars that forever marks Mankind, an unforgivable blemish of which we are all be ashamed of. But unfortunately what has clearly happened is that in the haste of assembling a History of the War this Secret Holocaust, witnessed by just a handful of people, never directly attested to in any remaining document, done behind closed doors away from the view of even most Nazis, from which there were no survivors (no one escaped from the showers, even Victor Frankl in his most famous account of the Holocaust never actually witnessed the showers), has been confused with the utterly vast humanitarian disaster that unfolded after the Allied invasion of Germany. In my own mind the careless, or even unwillingness to seek a true history of the War does immeasurable damage to the memory of the Holocaust, and the people who lost their lives in it. If indeed Holocaust deaths can be attributed to Allied action, and it seems impossible that German Concentration Camp victims were not affected by the starvation inflicted by the Allies on the rest of Germany, it is easy to understand why there is little appetite for a true history of the War. It is easier to heap all 80 million deaths onto Hitler and the Nazis. Unfortunately I fear however this absolving of the Allies of blame does nothing to wake people up to the cost of war, and nothing to prevent such a thing again (as indeed it is happening right now in the various theatres of war the Allies have opened up since 9/11 with millions displaced and hungry in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Africa from Allied intervention). Without proper Historical Accuracy then what do we Remember on Armistice Day, and what exactly are we trying to stop happening again?
A search for happiness in poverty. Happiness with personal loss, and a challenge to the wisdom of economic growth and environmental exploitation.
Wednesday, 13 June 2018
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