“"We see railway tracks anywhere and think about Auschwitz," Anselm Kiefer reportedly remarked after painting Lot’s Wife. Once a cause for scandal, in recent years the association of the Holocaust with industrial modernity has become an entrapping cliché.
"Once the qualitative specificity of the extermination of European Jewry is recognized, it becomes clear that attempts at an explanation dealing with capitalism, racism, bureaucracy, sexual repression, or the authoritarian personality, remain far too general."
I'm afraid you gloss too quickly over Postone's observations, and get lost in the accounting ledger.
Sweeping abstract characterizations of the Reich as a whole, analyses of the logistics involved in murdering millions, miss a fundamental psychological reality- *the methods of extermination are the product of ruthless intent*.
Whether put up against a wall and shot, hung in public executions, or through engineered starvation, all were effective in accomplishing the purpose, and were employed throughout occupied Europe. The gas chambers were emblematic precisely because they required relatively crude, cheap technology. The Nazis were trying to find the least expensive, least time consuming manner for perpetrating genocide.
The ethnic cleansing was not in support of the Nazi war effort, the Nazi war effort was in support of the desired ethnic cleansing.
We know this because that is precisely what the Nazi's themselves said, over and over.
I think too much is made of Arendt's observation that Eichmann was dull-witted and shallow, and in fact I think she made too much of this, maybe because she was a brilliant person with brilliant friends and associates, trying to make sense of how millions could be mobilized in the service of committing atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities.
I find the words of Primo Levi (Italian Jew, Nobel winning author, and Auschwitz survivor) always clarifying in this regard-
"Before the Nazis started using the gigantic multiple crematoriums, the countless bodies of the victims- who had been deliberately killed or succumbed to deprivation and disease- might have been evidence and had to be somehow disposed of. The first solution, so macabre one hesitates to describe it, was simply to stack the bodies, hundreds of thousands of them, in large common graves. This was done chiefly at Treblinka, in other smaller camps, and behind the lines in Russia. It was a temporary solution, adopted with brutal nonchalance at a time when the German armies were triumphant on every front and the final victory seemed certain: they could decide what to do about them later, since in any case, to the victor goes possession of the truth, which he can manipulate as he pleases. Some way would be found to justify the common graves, make them disappear, or blame the Soviets... The prisoners themselves were forced to dig up the pitiful remains and burn them in open fires, as if an operation of such proportions, and so out out of the ordinary, could completely escape notice.
The SS commanders and the security services went to great lengths to make sure not a single witness would survive. This is the meaning (it is hard to imagine another) behind the deadly, and seemingly insane, transfers that brought the story of the Nazi camps to a close, in the early months of 1945: the survivors of Majdanek were transferred to Auschwitz, those of Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen, and the women of Ravensbruck to Schwerin. The point was that all of them had to be removed from the liberation and redeported toward the heart of Germany under invasion from the east and west. It didn't matter that the prisoners died on the way; what mattered was that they not tell the story. In fact, after operating as centers of political terror, then as death factories and subsequently (and simultaneously) as bottomless pools of ever-replenished slave labor, the Lagers had become dangerous for a dying Germany, because they contained the secret of the Lager themselves, the greatest crime in the history of humankind. "(from The Drowned and the Saved)
Ruthless intent, conscious, calculated and depraved. For no other purpose, and for which there is no other, greater meaning to be discovered.
This is the lesson that gets lost in the shuffling of numbers and the parsing of histories of the Reich.
I don't think looking closely at the logistic and operations of Germany's civilian killing system, finding it meager when compared to the logistics and operations of the German war effort, does any damage to the claim that modernity and capitalism have marked the triumph of instrumental reason. And the Nazis did exterminat millions with their lesser killing apparatus. The Nazi project was a ruthless and evil imperialism. The mass killing of the Jews and others was just a component of that imperial project. Yet, what would have become of the mass killing project had the Nazis been victorious? Fortunately, this disutopia was avoided. But, it's easy to comprehend what would have happened, even if most would find it very unpleasant to comprehend in detail the incomprehensible. Killing was the point of it all.
I think the point against Postpone's generalization is not in the question if the ethnic cleansing was in support of the war effort or the other way around. The question is if the fact that killing becomes an end in its own is a specific feature of Nazi antisemitism that marks a complete departure from previous (and later) genocides. This argument, that Nazi antisemitism is on the one hand a potentially universal feature of modernity and at the same time something completely new and unique only makes sense if Nazi Germany is somehow seen as being at the cutting edge of modernity and was therefore setting an example.
I think what the notion of uneven and combined development offers with regards to Postone is the important observation that neither the Holocaust nor Nazi Germany in general was the embodiment of modernity.
Or to put it counter factually: If Nazi antisemitism is indeed, as Postone claims, a revolt against the value form and abstract labor, then why did it not manifest in the US, where mass production and value form relationships were vastly more common then in interwar Germany? Why does it not manifest even more violently today, where the value form is even more ubiquitous? These are questions that come up if you really try to test the historical earnestness of these kind of claims and I think the larger point made against the mix of drama and banality in them is very valid.
How does the Holocaust of a mere 6 million people outshine the Holocaust of over 100 Million Native North Americans in your view? It's obvious to most of the planet that USA has been far more murderous over 200 years than any short-lived German regime ever could.
But certainly US was all settler colonialism with the land grabbing and the desciption of savages being the equivalent of Lebensraum and untermenschen.
Personally I would vote for the Roma as being most underreported - smaller than the jews, but a similar proportion of the total and barely mentioned. There was an excellent Roma museum in one of the huts at Auschwitz when I visited.
Morality changes by the year. We held ourselves to much higher standards in the 20th century, and higher standards again in the 21st.
I see what you’re getting at. But why not say it directly? Those that do call out Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza are arrested, smeared as antisemites, cancelled and deplatformed. And today, there’s simply no excuse for ‘not knowing’ and not speaking out as this is a graphically documented, live-streamed genocide, and one that is boastfully proclaimed by its perpetrators.
Agreed. "Why not say it directly?" I guess I was teasing out the idea that this is what Adam was saying indirectly.
Not sure they can smear anyone as anti-semite today though - it works negatively, it is a form of praise that they are reduced to such base tactics. We have become immune.
Never again, means never again. Zionist Israel is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany. Both myth inspired, irrational, genocidal racial supremacists. Some could argue that Zionist Israel is perhaps a greater threat to humanity in the long run as they are zealously aided by nearly the entire western ruling class and their MSM, their courts and their schools. After killing babies in Gaza, then what? Theyll just put away all their killing machines, stow their supremacist attitude to the world and enjoy utopia? No. Gaza is only the first step for this pack of murders. A test of how brazenly they can commit genocide and get away with it. While there is uniform support for the Zionist Israel's among the ruling class, opposition continues to grow among the massive other side of the economic divide: the wage slaves. That's where the solution to the problem lies.
The real issue is the decline of USA in the world and its inability to protect its client state. This means that the future of Israel is difficult and it may collapse. Psychologically Israel understands this, but like the USA it is unable to adopt a saner more conciliatory path - it wants to go out in a blaze of anger.
I think this all plays out in next 3-5 years. But sadly we may see the deaths of half or more of the 2.0 remaining Gazans first.
And there we go. The whole pack of you Jew-haters braying your DARVO bullshit. Putting up blinders at the real genocidal murders, rapes, mutilations, and hostage-taking of October 7. Conflating the actions of war in a world where Israel is under existential threat with "the Jewish solution." And repeating Jew-hating canards with self-righteousness. Don't pretend that you wouldn't have manned the ovens to cleanse the world of Jews and been proud to do so.
Here we go again, indeed. You defend a genocide just like those that built and directed the Holocaust. You talk, think and act like Hitler!
There is nothing to discuss with a fervent baby killing racial supremacist. So, see you on the barricades. Millions are ready to die to stop you and that number will only increase.
Keep talking. The world increasingly sees you "Patricia".
There are 15-16 million Jews in the entire world. That's only a little more than the population of Tokyo. It is not even as many Jews worldwide as before the Shoah. Jews are--unlike both Christianity and Islam, each with about two billion adherents--not interested in converting anyone. We just want to be left alone.
Instead people like you--and, damn, there are a lot of you!--want to wipe us out. Why are Jews so threatening to you? Why do you imagine so few of us could--or want to--take over (particularly in light of the numbers above. Particularly in light of both Christian and Muslim colonialism through history)?
You might want to take a hard look in the mirror at what you are trying not to face in your own history.
As for me, Shabbat is coming. I'm going to go and do my Jewish thing. With joy.
And don't equate doing your Jewish thing for Sabbath (enjoy) with what Israelis are presently doing in Palestinian Occupied Territories, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and planning to attack Iran. That has nothing to do with following your traditions - unles you see all your neighbours as Amaleck and impures, that need to be eliminated...
I have made three television documentaries about the Holocaust. In the course of making them, I spent a week at the national German archives in Koblinz and two weeks at the Israeli archive at Yad Vashem. I think I looked at 5.000 photographs. I interviewed about two dozen survivors. I spent two days at Auschwitz while Poland was still under communism so the place was largely untouched since the war. I did consulting work for the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The effect of all this emersion was the creation of a kind of distance between the images and the events. The events are there, undeniably occurred, but the humanity of both the victims and the perpetrators was dimmed. It was all too much.
But the very worst thing I have ever seen in my life, was a trench, cut with a bulldozer and filled with white plastic body bags, casually sprinkled with dirt. The bags were torn where feral dogs had come in the night to feed on the bodies. I was so upset by this I could not film it, I cancelled the day and went back to the hotel. This ditch was in northern Israel and the bodies were Palestinian.
Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking, after finishing the book, has committed suicide. I am thinking at the parallels between the Japanese samurais that were polishing their swor mastery with beheading Chinese civilians (one JAP soldier confessed that while they were raping the women were thing of them as being human, but immediately after that, on the way of killing said "women" they were thought as pigs), and the IDF snipers, targeting the skulls and chests of small children (smaller target). The only difference I see is the inherent cowardice in the IDF soldiers.
One item stood out in this article as to how the Right Wing perceived itself as the victim of all of this horror. We see the same propaganda playing out in this Country. Trump and Musk playing on the ears of white men being victimized by immigrants, gay people, even women who are stealing their jobs and their manhood. A slippery slope to the atrocities that are inevitably coming in America. This budget bill will defund the courts. There will be no protection against Project 2025. The Final Solution for American Democracy.
Eichmann's Holocaust was IBM's Holocaust. The victims could never have been classified counted and tracked without the punch-card technology knowingly provided by IBM throughout the war.
Although, as usual, it's impossible not to appreciate Adam's creativity and erudition, this essay takes on ideas that no one really holds as proxies for a sentiment that they do. Yes, people associate the holocaust and industrial modernity. But no one has specifically maintained that a) a large proportion of Germany's industrial/logistical capacity was devoted to the holocaust, or that b) the holocaust required the use of Germany's most advanced technology at every stage of its operation. The sentiment exists for other reasons: simply that the part of the holocaust that culminated in the camps was historically novel in its use of industrial methods, of any technological level, in all of transport, administration, and killing. That is a fair observation.
Adam undoubtedly knows that least half of the killing of Jews didn't take place in the extermination camps at all. If you add in the labour camps (which seems appropriate), you get at most 3.5m of the 6m total. But the remainder were killed in ways not technological at all: shot over pits, disease and hunger, forced marches. That's underestimated by Auschwitz/industrialisation as the predominant mental image of the holocaust, but this doesn't come through in the essay.
Who could have predicted that the descendants of Holocaust survivors would perpetrate genocide themselves eighty years later? Israel has killed the Holocaust industry.
No do the same for the Gaza holocaust, the digitization of killing decission, with Lavander and such, with trying to do it all despite the world knowing, and sustaining a huge PR campaign reaching the highest level of decisionmakers in the world...
The process of war time logistics and the inclusion in the overall railway schedule of what basically is shunting to minor sidings of the overall system is the banality.
Almost like footnotes in the overall casualty narrative of the workings of the huge Eastern Front war machine that killed 50-60 million or more people in its totality - but more morally significant as ambitious banality trumped humanity.
IMO, if you really want a more in depth understanding of the mentality of the Holocaust in that period of time and the philosophical underpinnings of European anti-semitism, it is better to read Arendt's book - "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
Brilliant essay. I would point out also how much of the Holocaust was accomplished by the Einsatzgruppen — the holocaust of the gun, a truly low-tech ramshackle effort, though no less deadly than anything bearing resemblance to industrial modernity.
Every word and image in this article made me angry and sad. The Palestinian Nakba has been televised. Unlike the Germans who did their work outside their borders and in secret, the Zionists are promoting their crimes to the rest of the world and no one cares. Anyone who doesn’t make the connection to Palestine today is as guilty as those who turned their backs, or participated during the 1940s.
This is emblematic of how little the west values non-white people. Even our suffering, alongside our lives, livelihoods, lands and cultures are erased.
Europes contribution to humanity is genocide and institutional hate. At least take pride in it.
Thank you Adam - your essay has changed my perspective on the centrality of the Holocaust in the German war. As for the railways, one of the most memorable interviews in Claud Lanzmann’s Shoah is with one of the drivers of the trains - he comes across as just another train driver, except for when he says that he and his colleagues got extra rations of vodka as a reward, or tranquiliser, for the work that they were doing.
I appreciate this post and disagree with the commenters who say the focus on the specifics distracts from the acts themselves. The facts are what they are, and the death of millions of people at their hands is still evil.
"Once the qualitative specificity of the extermination of European Jewry is recognized, it becomes clear that attempts at an explanation dealing with capitalism, racism, bureaucracy, sexual repression, or the authoritarian personality, remain far too general."
I'm afraid you gloss too quickly over Postone's observations, and get lost in the accounting ledger.
Sweeping abstract characterizations of the Reich as a whole, analyses of the logistics involved in murdering millions, miss a fundamental psychological reality- *the methods of extermination are the product of ruthless intent*.
Whether put up against a wall and shot, hung in public executions, or through engineered starvation, all were effective in accomplishing the purpose, and were employed throughout occupied Europe. The gas chambers were emblematic precisely because they required relatively crude, cheap technology. The Nazis were trying to find the least expensive, least time consuming manner for perpetrating genocide.
The ethnic cleansing was not in support of the Nazi war effort, the Nazi war effort was in support of the desired ethnic cleansing.
We know this because that is precisely what the Nazi's themselves said, over and over.
I think too much is made of Arendt's observation that Eichmann was dull-witted and shallow, and in fact I think she made too much of this, maybe because she was a brilliant person with brilliant friends and associates, trying to make sense of how millions could be mobilized in the service of committing atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities.
I find the words of Primo Levi (Italian Jew, Nobel winning author, and Auschwitz survivor) always clarifying in this regard-
"Before the Nazis started using the gigantic multiple crematoriums, the countless bodies of the victims- who had been deliberately killed or succumbed to deprivation and disease- might have been evidence and had to be somehow disposed of. The first solution, so macabre one hesitates to describe it, was simply to stack the bodies, hundreds of thousands of them, in large common graves. This was done chiefly at Treblinka, in other smaller camps, and behind the lines in Russia. It was a temporary solution, adopted with brutal nonchalance at a time when the German armies were triumphant on every front and the final victory seemed certain: they could decide what to do about them later, since in any case, to the victor goes possession of the truth, which he can manipulate as he pleases. Some way would be found to justify the common graves, make them disappear, or blame the Soviets... The prisoners themselves were forced to dig up the pitiful remains and burn them in open fires, as if an operation of such proportions, and so out out of the ordinary, could completely escape notice.
The SS commanders and the security services went to great lengths to make sure not a single witness would survive. This is the meaning (it is hard to imagine another) behind the deadly, and seemingly insane, transfers that brought the story of the Nazi camps to a close, in the early months of 1945: the survivors of Majdanek were transferred to Auschwitz, those of Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen, and the women of Ravensbruck to Schwerin. The point was that all of them had to be removed from the liberation and redeported toward the heart of Germany under invasion from the east and west. It didn't matter that the prisoners died on the way; what mattered was that they not tell the story. In fact, after operating as centers of political terror, then as death factories and subsequently (and simultaneously) as bottomless pools of ever-replenished slave labor, the Lagers had become dangerous for a dying Germany, because they contained the secret of the Lager themselves, the greatest crime in the history of humankind. "(from The Drowned and the Saved)
Ruthless intent, conscious, calculated and depraved. For no other purpose, and for which there is no other, greater meaning to be discovered.
This is the lesson that gets lost in the shuffling of numbers and the parsing of histories of the Reich.
I don't think looking closely at the logistic and operations of Germany's civilian killing system, finding it meager when compared to the logistics and operations of the German war effort, does any damage to the claim that modernity and capitalism have marked the triumph of instrumental reason. And the Nazis did exterminat millions with their lesser killing apparatus. The Nazi project was a ruthless and evil imperialism. The mass killing of the Jews and others was just a component of that imperial project. Yet, what would have become of the mass killing project had the Nazis been victorious? Fortunately, this disutopia was avoided. But, it's easy to comprehend what would have happened, even if most would find it very unpleasant to comprehend in detail the incomprehensible. Killing was the point of it all.
I think the point against Postpone's generalization is not in the question if the ethnic cleansing was in support of the war effort or the other way around. The question is if the fact that killing becomes an end in its own is a specific feature of Nazi antisemitism that marks a complete departure from previous (and later) genocides. This argument, that Nazi antisemitism is on the one hand a potentially universal feature of modernity and at the same time something completely new and unique only makes sense if Nazi Germany is somehow seen as being at the cutting edge of modernity and was therefore setting an example.
I think what the notion of uneven and combined development offers with regards to Postone is the important observation that neither the Holocaust nor Nazi Germany in general was the embodiment of modernity.
Or to put it counter factually: If Nazi antisemitism is indeed, as Postone claims, a revolt against the value form and abstract labor, then why did it not manifest in the US, where mass production and value form relationships were vastly more common then in interwar Germany? Why does it not manifest even more violently today, where the value form is even more ubiquitous? These are questions that come up if you really try to test the historical earnestness of these kind of claims and I think the larger point made against the mix of drama and banality in them is very valid.
How does the Holocaust of a mere 6 million people outshine the Holocaust of over 100 Million Native North Americans in your view? It's obvious to most of the planet that USA has been far more murderous over 200 years than any short-lived German regime ever could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States
Wikipedia has 4m
But certainly US was all settler colonialism with the land grabbing and the desciption of savages being the equivalent of Lebensraum and untermenschen.
Personally I would vote for the Roma as being most underreported - smaller than the jews, but a similar proportion of the total and barely mentioned. There was an excellent Roma museum in one of the huts at Auschwitz when I visited.
Morality changes by the year. We held ourselves to much higher standards in the 20th century, and higher standards again in the 21st.
I think of Auschwitz and I think of those that did not cry out GENOCIDE.
And the promises I made to myself on my visits that thank god there will be no more genocides but if there will be I must stand up and call it out.
And I think of the German grandchildren 50 years later asking "did you know?"
Modernity 2025 seems to be about deception. State deception making permissible self-deception. Not much different from modernity 1940.
I see what you’re getting at. But why not say it directly? Those that do call out Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza are arrested, smeared as antisemites, cancelled and deplatformed. And today, there’s simply no excuse for ‘not knowing’ and not speaking out as this is a graphically documented, live-streamed genocide, and one that is boastfully proclaimed by its perpetrators.
Agreed. "Why not say it directly?" I guess I was teasing out the idea that this is what Adam was saying indirectly.
Not sure they can smear anyone as anti-semite today though - it works negatively, it is a form of praise that they are reduced to such base tactics. We have become immune.
Never again, means never again. Zionist Israel is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany. Both myth inspired, irrational, genocidal racial supremacists. Some could argue that Zionist Israel is perhaps a greater threat to humanity in the long run as they are zealously aided by nearly the entire western ruling class and their MSM, their courts and their schools. After killing babies in Gaza, then what? Theyll just put away all their killing machines, stow their supremacist attitude to the world and enjoy utopia? No. Gaza is only the first step for this pack of murders. A test of how brazenly they can commit genocide and get away with it. While there is uniform support for the Zionist Israel's among the ruling class, opposition continues to grow among the massive other side of the economic divide: the wage slaves. That's where the solution to the problem lies.
The real issue is the decline of USA in the world and its inability to protect its client state. This means that the future of Israel is difficult and it may collapse. Psychologically Israel understands this, but like the USA it is unable to adopt a saner more conciliatory path - it wants to go out in a blaze of anger.
I think this all plays out in next 3-5 years. But sadly we may see the deaths of half or more of the 2.0 remaining Gazans first.
And there we go. The whole pack of you Jew-haters braying your DARVO bullshit. Putting up blinders at the real genocidal murders, rapes, mutilations, and hostage-taking of October 7. Conflating the actions of war in a world where Israel is under existential threat with "the Jewish solution." And repeating Jew-hating canards with self-righteousness. Don't pretend that you wouldn't have manned the ovens to cleanse the world of Jews and been proud to do so.
No rapes, no baby deaths on October 7th (well excluding one).
Half the dead were killed by IDF to stop any hostages being taken away.
You know this but still repeat the lie.
And then paranoia as the excuse.
Just been To Whitehall London to protest, as usual many fine jewish protesters with us - not a difficult moral judgement for most British jews.
Here we go again, indeed. You defend a genocide just like those that built and directed the Holocaust. You talk, think and act like Hitler!
There is nothing to discuss with a fervent baby killing racial supremacist. So, see you on the barricades. Millions are ready to die to stop you and that number will only increase.
Keep talking. The world increasingly sees you "Patricia".
"They tried to kill us. They failed. Let's eat."
There are 15-16 million Jews in the entire world. That's only a little more than the population of Tokyo. It is not even as many Jews worldwide as before the Shoah. Jews are--unlike both Christianity and Islam, each with about two billion adherents--not interested in converting anyone. We just want to be left alone.
Instead people like you--and, damn, there are a lot of you!--want to wipe us out. Why are Jews so threatening to you? Why do you imagine so few of us could--or want to--take over (particularly in light of the numbers above. Particularly in light of both Christian and Muslim colonialism through history)?
You might want to take a hard look in the mirror at what you are trying not to face in your own history.
As for me, Shabbat is coming. I'm going to go and do my Jewish thing. With joy.
Ben Gvir and the other lunatic minister want something like this: https://mepei.com/greater-israel-an-ongoing-expansion-plan-for-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/
And don't equate doing your Jewish thing for Sabbath (enjoy) with what Israelis are presently doing in Palestinian Occupied Territories, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and planning to attack Iran. That has nothing to do with following your traditions - unles you see all your neighbours as Amaleck and impures, that need to be eliminated...
Nobody wants to wipe you out except yourselves.
What would be the quickest way to destroy israel?
let them kill the Gazans and wait, and within 5 years they are all gone in shame. Like Germans in Poland, vanished in shame
We want to stop that, you want it.
Why do you think I'm not Jewish, Zionazi? Well, I'm off to do my human thing. Bye, bye.
If the Zionist State is now under existential threat, the dangers it faces are of its own doing. The creation of the state of Israel was a mistake.
I have made three television documentaries about the Holocaust. In the course of making them, I spent a week at the national German archives in Koblinz and two weeks at the Israeli archive at Yad Vashem. I think I looked at 5.000 photographs. I interviewed about two dozen survivors. I spent two days at Auschwitz while Poland was still under communism so the place was largely untouched since the war. I did consulting work for the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The effect of all this emersion was the creation of a kind of distance between the images and the events. The events are there, undeniably occurred, but the humanity of both the victims and the perpetrators was dimmed. It was all too much.
But the very worst thing I have ever seen in my life, was a trench, cut with a bulldozer and filled with white plastic body bags, casually sprinkled with dirt. The bags were torn where feral dogs had come in the night to feed on the bodies. I was so upset by this I could not film it, I cancelled the day and went back to the hotel. This ditch was in northern Israel and the bodies were Palestinian.
Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking, after finishing the book, has committed suicide. I am thinking at the parallels between the Japanese samurais that were polishing their swor mastery with beheading Chinese civilians (one JAP soldier confessed that while they were raping the women were thing of them as being human, but immediately after that, on the way of killing said "women" they were thought as pigs), and the IDF snipers, targeting the skulls and chests of small children (smaller target). The only difference I see is the inherent cowardice in the IDF soldiers.
One item stood out in this article as to how the Right Wing perceived itself as the victim of all of this horror. We see the same propaganda playing out in this Country. Trump and Musk playing on the ears of white men being victimized by immigrants, gay people, even women who are stealing their jobs and their manhood. A slippery slope to the atrocities that are inevitably coming in America. This budget bill will defund the courts. There will be no protection against Project 2025. The Final Solution for American Democracy.
starving people to death is much more authentic
Eichmann's Holocaust was IBM's Holocaust. The victims could never have been classified counted and tracked without the punch-card technology knowingly provided by IBM throughout the war.
Thank you. This is very true, and very timely, and very enlightening. The banality of evil through numbers.
Although, as usual, it's impossible not to appreciate Adam's creativity and erudition, this essay takes on ideas that no one really holds as proxies for a sentiment that they do. Yes, people associate the holocaust and industrial modernity. But no one has specifically maintained that a) a large proportion of Germany's industrial/logistical capacity was devoted to the holocaust, or that b) the holocaust required the use of Germany's most advanced technology at every stage of its operation. The sentiment exists for other reasons: simply that the part of the holocaust that culminated in the camps was historically novel in its use of industrial methods, of any technological level, in all of transport, administration, and killing. That is a fair observation.
Adam undoubtedly knows that least half of the killing of Jews didn't take place in the extermination camps at all. If you add in the labour camps (which seems appropriate), you get at most 3.5m of the 6m total. But the remainder were killed in ways not technological at all: shot over pits, disease and hunger, forced marches. That's underestimated by Auschwitz/industrialisation as the predominant mental image of the holocaust, but this doesn't come through in the essay.
Who could have predicted that the descendants of Holocaust survivors would perpetrate genocide themselves eighty years later? Israel has killed the Holocaust industry.
No do the same for the Gaza holocaust, the digitization of killing decission, with Lavander and such, with trying to do it all despite the world knowing, and sustaining a huge PR campaign reaching the highest level of decisionmakers in the world...
The process of war time logistics and the inclusion in the overall railway schedule of what basically is shunting to minor sidings of the overall system is the banality.
Almost like footnotes in the overall casualty narrative of the workings of the huge Eastern Front war machine that killed 50-60 million or more people in its totality - but more morally significant as ambitious banality trumped humanity.
IMO, if you really want a more in depth understanding of the mentality of the Holocaust in that period of time and the philosophical underpinnings of European anti-semitism, it is better to read Arendt's book - "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
Brilliant essay. I would point out also how much of the Holocaust was accomplished by the Einsatzgruppen — the holocaust of the gun, a truly low-tech ramshackle effort, though no less deadly than anything bearing resemblance to industrial modernity.
Every word and image in this article made me angry and sad. The Palestinian Nakba has been televised. Unlike the Germans who did their work outside their borders and in secret, the Zionists are promoting their crimes to the rest of the world and no one cares. Anyone who doesn’t make the connection to Palestine today is as guilty as those who turned their backs, or participated during the 1940s.
This is emblematic of how little the west values non-white people. Even our suffering, alongside our lives, livelihoods, lands and cultures are erased.
Europes contribution to humanity is genocide and institutional hate. At least take pride in it.
Nobody’s buying this anymore
Thank you Adam - your essay has changed my perspective on the centrality of the Holocaust in the German war. As for the railways, one of the most memorable interviews in Claud Lanzmann’s Shoah is with one of the drivers of the trains - he comes across as just another train driver, except for when he says that he and his colleagues got extra rations of vodka as a reward, or tranquiliser, for the work that they were doing.
I appreciate this post and disagree with the commenters who say the focus on the specifics distracts from the acts themselves. The facts are what they are, and the death of millions of people at their hands is still evil.