It’s a blunt New York Times headline about a story that — here is the horror of it all — focused on German bureaucrats doing what governments pay bureaucrats to do, which is plan things.
Read this headline without shuddering: “80 Years Ago the Nazis Planned the ‘Final Solution.’ It Took 90 Minutes.”
Actually, the death squads of the Third Reich were already at work. The following summary material makes that clear:
The host on that January day in 1942 was Reinhard Heydrich, the powerful chief of the security service and the SS, who had been put in charge by Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, of a “final solution” and coordinating it with other government departments and ministries.
The men Heydrich invited were senior civil servants and party officials. Most of them were in their 30s, nine of them had law degrees, more than half had Ph.D.s.
When they convened around a table overlooking Lake Wannsee, the genocide was already underway. The deportations of Jews and mass killings in eastern territories had begun the previous fall but the meeting that day laid the groundwork for a machinery of mass murder that would involve the entire state apparatus and ultimately millions of Germans in different roles.
Here is my question and, I will admit, that there is more to it than mere journalism. Is it possible to write about this subject in a way that does not discuss evil with a Big E?
I’ve been thinking about that question ever since I read historian John Toland’s “Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography.” That’s a 1,000-page classic that will earn you some stares as you read it, day after day, on mass transit. The key was that Toland interviewed many, many people who knew Hitler at different stages of his life. Thus, as the 1976Times review put it, the author allowed readers to “draw their own conclusions about what made Hitler as he was, ‘a warped archangel, a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.’ “
In the end, however, Toland was forced to contemplate how a symbolic element of the Holocaust rulebook — “the choice” — was an offense to German efficiency.
Why force a Jewish parent to choose the one family member who would be spared from immediate death? Why not make a logical, efficient, bureaucratic choice to select the best possible worker for some camp function?
This wasn’t about logic, Toland decided. This was illogical Evil, forcing readers to gaze into the logic of the demonic.
That form of Evil is never discussed in this new Times piece. Thus, the piece is “haunted,” as we say here at GetReligion.
Yes, the simple, clear information about the businesslike work of the bureaucrats is horrible. The Adolf Eichmann notes on the meeting evolved into a policy document and survived the Nazi shredders, buried in the files of an “under secretary” in the German Foreign Office whose name was Martin Luther.
Only one of 30 copies of his 15-page protocol, marked in red as “secret” on the first page, survived. It was discovered by American soldiers among the files of the Foreign Ministry after the war. …
“With appropriate prior authorization from the Führer, emigration has now been replaced by evacuation of the Jews to the East as another possible solution,” the protocol noted. “In the course of this final solution of the Jewish question, roughly 11 million Jews will be taken into consideration.” …
“The evacuated Jews will first be taken, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from where they will be transported onward to the East,” it continued. “With regards to the manner in which the final solution will be carried out in those European territories which we now either control or influence, it has been suggested that the pertinent specialists in the Foreign Ministry should confer with the responsible official of the Security Police and the SD.”
It was the language of bureaucrats. But there was never any doubt what the document was laying out: “The complete elimination of the European Jews,” as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, wrote in his diary after reading the minutes.
Are any of the experts and historians who are discussing this 80th anniversary asking questions that transcend blots of ink on the pages of a bureaucrat’s memo?
I will assume that the answer is “yes,” because I find it hard to believe that it’s possible to contemplate this subject in purely logical, “secular” terms. Did anyone ask about this “ghost”?
FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot from YouTube, drawn from “Sophie’s Choice.”