PETER MORGAN
Peter Morgan was a secondary school History teacher for 21 years and has worked in Holocaust education with the Centre for Holocaust Education at UCL and the Holocaust Educational Trust. As part of his PhD, he is currently researching British discourses about the Armenian genocide 1915-23. He is based in the School of Humanities and the research cluster for ‘Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence’ at the University of Brighton. Part of Peter’s work has been analysing the way in which there was a new discourse on the mass killing of civilians that foretold the modern definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing – one which was later quickly forgotten by the mid-1920s due to realpolitik, arguably with tragic consequences for European Jewry. Not only was it largely forgotten; the discourse also contained some alarming features in terms of British identity and complicity in 20th century methods and rationales of the mass killing of civilians. As such, this research demonstrates the importance of studying the Holocaust within a wider context of modern genocide.
“Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already I felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzipora was holding Mother’s hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister’s blond hair, as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever. I kept walking, my father holding my hand.
– Extract from Night by Elie Wiesel
The late Elie Wiesel. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The above extract is often used in Holocaust education and public discourse to emphasise the inhumanity of the Holocaust and, I would suggest, to stress its uniqueness and the manner in which it can be interpreted as an event outside of history and human experience. In fact, that it cannot be interpreted at all by normal analysis and language; that it must never be forgotten; and never allowed to happen again. In noting the number of words used, however, Wiesel has sought to encapsulate his memory of this ultimately dreadful experience to make sense of it for himself. In commenting on the brevity and simplicity of the words, and the manner in which they were shouted or spoken with a raised voice, he also directly relates his own micro-history with the meta-history of the Holocaust. He has begun to analyse the language, motives and character of the perpetrators. He has started to focus in on a number of seconds during the process chosen by the Nazis to kill huge numbers of people as quickly and efficiently as possible. Indeed, in commenting on the ‘fraction of a second’, the movement to the right and the lack of knowledge involved, he is deconstructing the machinery of death and why it worked. He has used literature to explain, at least in part, this particular aspect of the Holocaust.
This represents a fundamental understanding of what the Holocaust meant – and means – in terms of the personal, familial and social significance of the scale of the bureaucratised, modern organisation of mass killing and a state’s assault on an entire group. Despite Wiesel’s insistence that the Holocaust denies language, it nevertheless demonstrates someone looking back at a particular moment, in which the individual possessed very little knowledge of what was happening, in a manner which shows a great deal of awareness and understanding. Awareness and understanding of the disassociation of the perpetrators; the systematic and processual nature of the act of mass killing; the gulf between love and humanity and hate and inhumanity, as well as the impact on an individual, on a family, on a whole group and indeed the whole of humanity. Placed alongside Wiesel’s later research into the nature of the Nazi state and its racist ideology, and how and why it was able to enact the Holocaust, it is perhaps all too clear that human beings are fully able to come to terms with the Holocaust with regards to explaining its causation, consequences and significance. It does not mean that that understanding is complete and uncontested, or is not confusing and alienating, but it does mean that it is knowable and explainable using the analytical tools of the academic disciplines involved. It does not stand outside of history and the experience of modern society and civilisation. Indeed, I would argue it is very much part of the fabric of these things and its increasing sacralisation is indicative of an increasingly desperate attempt on the part of modern states to disassociate themselves from the behaviours and rationales that brought it about – behaviours and rationales that they are in fact complicit in and responsible for.
Furthermore, this dissociation simplifies the Holocaust by increasing its Auschwitz-centric narrative and allowing people to separate themselves from human beings like them and, indeed, states and governments potentially like theirs. It places a huge distance between the Holocaust and a wider historical context of modern genocide, a context that many Western governments have been part of in a negative fashion. One way in which the Holocaust has been simplified is the manner in which it is portrayed as one monolithic event, as the only time in history that a government has planned and attempted to kill an entire group without exception. This suggests that the genocides in German South West Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Rwanda, for example, are not comparable and indeed in many eyes are not even genocides. In the last case, this interpretation was used to preclude international intervention as required by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. I would argue that, like all genocides and historical events in general, the Holocaust was unique. It may indeed be unique in significance as a result of the gulf between the perpetrators’ conceptualisation of the threat presented by the victims and the reality. Furthermore, for a short time, and a short time only, the standard operating procedure was to kill every member of the victim group that could be found. In this respect, however, the Holocaust is more comparable to the Armenian and Rwandan genocides than is normally accepted.
One of the reasons for this argument is that the Holocaust as a whole can, I believe, be broken down into three very connected but separate genocides. The first is the ghettoization and starvation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the mass killing by bludgeoning and shooting of hundreds and thousands of Jews there, particularly in the Soviet Union and Romania (carried out independently by that regime). It was only towards the end of this genocide in terms of its most active phase, in the autumn of 1941 (although it continued until the end of the war), that a concrete formulation of a complete ‘Final Solution’ developed. The second genocide revolves around Operation Reinhard and the destruction of Polish Jewry during 1942; indeed, this can be seen as the most complete genocide in history. It is only the third genocide which revolves around Auschwitz, and consists of an attempt to destroy the main part of the Jewish communities in both Western and Eastern Nazi-occupied Europe using one death camp, but also a place where significant numbers of Jews were selected for work. It culminates (in what could be seen as a separate event in itself) in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry in the summer of 1944. This is not now seen by some leading scholars as part of a final ‘Final Solution’ but a genocidal event which largely resulted from a set of localised circumstances rather than a general master plan. Thus, this last phase of extermination differed from the fate of Jewish communities in other parts of Europe. Scholars such as Longerich, Gerlach and Cesarani suggest that the ‘Final Solution’ never stopped developing due to changing circumstances and wartime realpolitik.
Other genocides, therefore, such as in the Ottoman Empire and Rwanda, can be directly compared to the Holocaust during the ‘first’ genocide that took place within it.
The British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies 