Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

"The fact is that all these were once clean-living and sane and certainly not the type to do harm to the Nazis. They are Jews and are dying now at the rate of three hundred a day. They must die and nothing can save them - their end is inescapable, they are too far gone now to be brought back to life. I saw their corpses lying near their hovels, for they crawl or totter out into the sunlight to die. I watched them make their last feeble journeys, and even as I watched they died."

Peter Coombs, British soldier, May 4, 1945 letter to his wife after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Quoted in The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert

Several years ago in this column I wrote about how far culpability should have extended for the existence of the concentration camps. Observing the carefully drawn plans for Auschwitz I wondered if the architects and engineers, perhaps the contractors as well, should not have been held responsible. As an architect I know it strains credibility far past the breaking point to believe that they could do such precise design and documentation without knowing toward what end their work was intended. Others, such as Daniel Goldhagen, in his study of the Holocaust, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” extended responsibility to nearly every German, citing a deep strain of virulent and particularly German anti-Semitism as the prime catalyst. While no one questions the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust, others do disagree with Goldhagen’s contention that the prime motivation for this genocide was some uniquely German characteristic. I would tend to agree with Goldhagen’s critics here. It is not to diminish in any way the monstrosity of the Holocaust to suggest that the most useful question right now might be to ask what are the characteristics of all genocide and how can the Holocaust help us to understand how a modern state creates such an event? What, in short, needs to be done - by leaders and followers - to create the unimaginable?

Last week I saw ‘Max’ at the Triplex in Great Barrington. This extraordinary film by Menno Meyjes portrays a hypothetical relationship between the young Adolph Hitler and a Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman. Hitler is, at this point in his life, trying to establish himself as an artist and Max - a fellow survivor of the battle of Ypres where he lost his right arm - becomes his mentor. It is an ambitious ‘what if’ film, investigating simultaneously the nature of art and the evolution and emergence of one of history’s most monstrous tyrants, the ultimate author of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and all the other ‘camps’. Most intriguing is the films depiction of the confluence of poverty, desperation, resentment, backlighted by an imagined glorious history and with all current problems assigned the responsibility of an easily identifiable scapegoat. As Roland M. Wagner of San Jose State University notes in his review of Goldhagen’s book, some of these factors leading to the rise of the Nazis and by extension the Holocaust, “include the defeat of Germany during the First World War, the punitive nature of the Versailles treaty, French ambitions for territorial acquisitions after the war, Germany's wounded national pride, political collapse and social turmoil, the Great Depression, economic ruination of the Middle Class, polarization between the extreme Left and the Right, fear of rampant Communism looming from the East, the association of the Jews with Bolshevism in the popular mind, the vulnerability of a population to seeking scape-goats during periods of rapid social change, a wide-spread historical tradition of anti-Semitism throughout Europe, peer pressure and conformity within a highly regimented totalitarian society, the iron grip that the Nazis had on the populace and on all organs of mass information, and so on.” In short all the ingredients that to a lesser or greater degree characterize the underpinning of all genocide. Manipulated properly, these things give you a recipe for horror. Most critical, however :you must divide the horror into small, manageable doses, allowing each new incremental increase in the ultimate nightmare scenario to become accepted before moving on from the new baseline. What was abhorrent to most people yesterday can be made palatable today if properly spoon fed and seasoned with sufficient fear.

The Nazi’s pioneered the modern use of propaganda. The barrage of hate aimed at the Jews was particularly odious and virulent, but the silencing of alternative views and media was also essential for the scape-goating to succeed. In addition, the concept of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ was developed to a fine art, the Jew versus the Aryan superman, the ‘true’ German, culled from a glorious past that never actually existed, but should have. Of course, you were either on board, with us, or you were with them and against us; there was no middle ground. You are with us or you are the enemy.

But, of course, the Nazis didn’t stop there: fear was the air everyone was forced to breath. Soon nearly everyone else in the world, nearly every other nation, was an enemy or a potential enemy. Such a threat had only one answer : military force. The ‘disgraced’ (defeated) armed forces would regain their ‘honor’ with the force of arms, freeing every German from his or her own disgrace. Other solutions, those that did not involve the military, were almost always discarded as weakness and appeasement, two obvious tools of the enemies of the state.

And of course, the necessary scapegoat. In ‘Max’ we watch the poison spread, with Hitler as only it’s most articulate proponent. Such scape-goating suited the interests of many powerful groups, most notably the military; its strength had been, they insisted, neglected for years, dishonoring the Fatherland. They said, ‘We are not to blame, it is them, the others, who are causing all our pain, poverty, weakness and dishonor.’ And of course the laws protecting the individual’s civil liberties needed to be changed so that enemies of the state can no longer hide behind such well intentioned but now counterproductive documents. Prepare, they told the German people, for war, now and forever.

It is not difficult to see how soon enough architects and engineers, like many others at the time, could start to see the merit in work they might have not long before found odious, be made to ‘understand’ the need to do their part to save the state from enemies within and without. After all, they need only provide a couple calculations, a few plans, a little building. Incremental, acceptable, normal.

To see the Holocaust as a moral catastrophe from the safe vantage point of over fifty years in the future challenges no reasonable person. What is urgently needed is to see it as a ‘filter’ through which we must run the events - war without end, us versus them, the undermining of individual civil liberties, the atmosphere of fear, political polarization - of out own time. We must let our understanding of this horrific event help us see the emerging moral catastrophes we might now be ignoring so that, regardless of who the victims might be, no one will ever have to observe what Peter Coombs’ observed on May 4, 1945.