Today is #YomHashoa, the day we commemorate the slaughter of 6 million Jews in Europe.
Thinking about how to ensure such horrors never happen again, I find Zygmunt Bauman's contribution incredibly helpful. Bauman, himself a Polish Jew, argues that the Holocaust was only possible because of the nature of modern bureaucracy, because of "just doing my job"--something I find to be as applicable to many of us in 2023:
Some quotes from "Modernity and the Holocaust":
1/n
Bauman quotes Henry Feingold:
"[Auschwitz] was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh.
2/n
The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo. In the gas chambers the victims inhaled noxious gas generated by prussic acid pellets, which were produced by the advanced chemical industry of Germany. Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy."
3/n
Bauman continues:
"The truth is that every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust – all those many things that rendered it possible – was normal; ‘normal’ not in the sense of the familiar, of one more specimen in a large class of phenomena long ago described in full, explained and accommodated (on the contrary, the experience of the Holocaust was new and unfamiliar),
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but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world – and of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society."
5/n
"We owe to Karl Schleuner the concept of the twisted road to physical extermination of European Jewry: a road which was neither conceived in a single vision of a mad monster, nor was a considered choice made at the start of the ‘problem-solving process’ by the ideologically motivated leaders. It did, rather, emerge inch by inch, pointing at each stage to a different destination, shifting in response to ever-new crises, and pressed forward with
6/n
a ‘we will cross that bridge once we come to it’ philosophy. Schleuner’s concept summarizes best the findings of the ‘functionalist’ school in the historiography of the Holocaust (which in recent years rapidly gains strength at the expense of the ‘intentionalists’, who in turn find it increasingly difficult to defend the once dominant single-cause explanation of the Holocaust – that is, a vision that ascribes to the genocide a motivational logic and a consistency it never possessed)."
7/n
"The most shattering of lessons deriving from the analysis of the ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ is that – in the last resort – the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means–ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application. To make the point sharper still – the choice was an effect of the earnest effort to find rational solutions to successive ‘problems’, as they arose in
8/n
the changing circumstances. It was also affected by the widely described bureaucratic tendency to goal-displacement – an affliction as normal in all bureaucracies as their routines. The very presence of functionaries charged with their specific tasks led to further initiatives and a continuous expansion of original purposes. Once again, expertise demonstrated its self-propelling capacity, its proclivity to expand and enrich the target which supplied its *raison d’etre."*
*9/n*
"It is common knowledge by now that the initial attempts to interpret the Holocaust as an outrage committed by born criminals, sadists, madmen, social miscreants or otherwise morally defective individuals failed to find any confirmation in the facts of the case."
...
"That most of the perpetrators of the genocide were normal people, who will freely flow through any known psychiatric sieve, however dense, is morally disturbing."
10/n
MOST IMPORTANT QUOTE OF THE WHOLE BOOK (in my opinion):
"And so, how were these ordinary Germans transformed into the German perpetrators of mass crime? In the opinion of Herbert C. Kelman, moral inhibitions against violent atrocities tend to be eroded once three conditions are met, singly or together; the violence is *authorized* (by official orders coming from the legally entitled quarters),
11/n
actions are *routinized *(by rule-governed practices and exact specification of roles), and the victims of the violence are *dehumanized *(by ideological definitions and indoctrinations)."
12/n
"So far we have tried to reconstruct the social mechanism of ‘overcoming the animal pity’; a social production of conduct contrary to innate moral inhibitions, capable of transforming individuals who are not ‘moral degenerates’ in any of the ‘normal’ senses, into murderers or conscious collaborators in the murdering process. The experience of the Holocaust brings into relief, however, another social mechanism; one with a much more sinister potential of involving
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in the perpetration of the genocide a much wider number of people who never in the process face consciously either difficult moral choices or the need to stifle inner resistance of conscience. The struggle over moral issues never takes place, as the moral aspects of actions are not immediately obvious or are deliberately prevented from discovery and discussion. In other words, the moral character of action is either invisible or purposefully concealed.
14/n
To quote Hilberg again, ‘It must be kept in mind that most of the participants [of genocide] did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers … Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk.’ Were they aware of the ultimate product of their ostensibly innocuous bustle–such knowledge would stay, at best, in the remote recesses of their minds."
15/n
I'll end with this idea of "moral sleeping pills":
"The technical-administrative success of the Holocaust was due in part to the skilful utilization of ‘moral sleeping pills’ made available by modern bureaucracy and modern technology. The natural invisibility of causal connections in a complex system of interaction, and the ‘distancing’ of the unsightly or morally repelling outcomes of action to the point of rendering them invisible to the actor, were most prominent among them."
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Raphael Mimoun רפאל מימון