Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning | Timothy Snyder (2017)

i'm going to stand up slowly so you can move the camera right [Laughter] okay good so what what what i'd like to do is spend the next three quarters of an hour with you presenting the argument from from black earth so black earth is a history of the holocaust and it's a traditional history in the sense that it does recount the events from 1933 to 1945 but it's its particular emphasis or it's it's its particular valence is it is its um emphasis on explanation so where i began the book was from the observation which others might contest that holocaust studies had moved into a memorial mode without ever having achieved satisfactory explanation and that the memorial mode was taking up the space that would have been needed for explanatory work and that in particular the memorial mode allowed us perhaps ironically to fall back into national modes of discussing the holocaust because when one discusses memory one invariably discusses a national memory and almost always one's national memory there is data to back up these assertions so the last time i looked which is a couple of years ago well over 90 of the conferences devoted to the holocaust were not devoted to the holocaust but they were devoted to the memory of the holocaust which is a quite different subject and for me it poses it always poses memory in general poses what i think of as the genitive question which is probably a slightly perverse way of putting it having to do with having studied too many languages which is memory memory of what and do we have the of what so this book is is an interpretive book it's an it's it's a book which makes which makes arguments but at the same time it makes these arguments very much on the basis of primary sources in particular jewish primary sources because for for me another irony of what had happened to the holocaust is that it had become enclosed in german history and in german sources which of course are indispensable but which cannot by their nature capture the perspective of the victims since 97 percent of the victims of the holocaust did not know the german language there is a sort of myth which says those sources are lost in in in the context of the holocaust people use the word lost and then it sounds pathetic and we're supposed to then understand that something terrible has happened to them but in fact the reverse is true it's remarkable how many sources we do have in russian yiddish polish and other in in the other languages which jews spoke at the time it's remarkable how much effort jews themselves went to to create sources at the time and it's also remarkable how many initiatives there were during and immediately after the war to preserve those sources which for me is is a reason to begin from them so what i'd like to do here is present the two arguments of of the book the two unfamiliar causal arguments of the book beginning from things that jews actually said about about their predicament so the way the argument in black earth works and i'm presenting it now in a very schematic way is that adding to or complementing the traditional argument from ideology which i accept in a certain form i add to ideology an ideology of what i think of as global anti-semitism the the factor of ecological panic and and the factor and the factor of the state and rather than running through how the book works i'm going to present each of these arguments beginning from the point of view of of a jewish survivor or in some cases not a survivor so let me begin with ecology with ecology a couple of sources that struck me particularly were one um a a a jewish revisionist zionist a man called feldshu who was one of the leaders of the the ghetto uprising of 1943 on the right wing on the right-wing side who in referring to the jewish ghetto and the destruction of the jewish ghetto left these these poignant words people lived under the earth which struck me as an interesting way of putting that situation people were living in basements in north uh in in northeastern warsaw the territory which have been defined as the ghetto and they had turned those basements into bunkers in many cases and from those bunkers they were trying to hold off germans um who very quickly moved to the the tactic of flame throwing the bunkers to drive people out and then soon when they came out but feldchu's comment was had this had this interesting ecological error to it we were living under the earth or to take um to take an example which is which is which is more famous the hungarian jewish poet um who was a forced laborer at the end of the war and an anticipation of his own death kept poetry um which he he he was he was he wrote poetry his whole life he was a poet that's what you do if you're a poet and he kept it in a small book which he kept in his left breast pocket and on the outside of the booklet in i think eight languages maybe six he's he left instructions saying when my body is found please make sure that these poems are are published so he was in fact murdered close to into the war his body was in fact buried in a pit it was in fact found and here here here's one line from one of the poems or a few lines in english either root was once the flower under these dim tons my bower comes the shearing of the thread death saw wailing overhead now i mean many things are striking about this one is the ability of people to compose poetry in these conditions right i mean for me the whole idea that there is no poetry after auschwitz is itself a barbarism because it denies the capacity of people to be civilized and precisely these barbaric conditions there's there's that there's also the reminder of how so many people in both of these quotations have helped so many people actually died in the holocaust that is to say the first and in my opinion the decisive uh killing technology of the holocaust was shooting people at close range the the the the death factories of belgian soviet treblinka helmno auschwitz come online later and they kill about the same number of people maybe slightly more but it's it's the murder by bullets at close range which which begins the process and which this is for me the decisive thing which instructs germans that this kind of thing is possible um it's long before the gas chambers are online that um that the discussion about a new form of final solution um that is killing people where they live has has has begun so but the thing that i wanted to draw on is the way that at the end at the end of his life this hungarian poet um this jewish poet is associating himself again again with the earth and what i want to try to draw from this from this poem is the intuition that maybe he has it right that i mean i could multiply these examples of the way that jews would talk about the earth and and i want to what i want to move from the intuition that perhaps there's something in the sources that we have missed or not taken seriously enough i think the thing that we have missed is the ecological the ecological construction or the ecological description that one can put on the holocaust so if we now move back a couple of decades in time and and shift from the minds of these jews who are dying towards the end of the holocaust towards the mind that was most important to its conception execution to adolf hitler and in mein kampf it's it's very striking how at the very beginning of mein kampf hitler begins from an ecological description now i should be really clear i get in more trouble with this in germany than in in the english-speaking world but it's a little bit unclear everywhere but ecological i don't mean in the sense of you recycle and that's a good thing by ecological i mean in the sense of looking at looking at life in terms of your relationship to the to the biological world that's what i mean by ecological i mean i mean in a neutral sense so hitler begins from what i would call his ecology his ecology which is presented in the first few pages of mein kampf says that all that there is on the planet is resources that's the only meaningful thing the meaningful resource is land the reason why land is a meaningful resource is that we extract we extract food from land he moves on to this the second opposite from this the second observation is that humans are essentially like animals human races he says are essentially like human species the way that human life exists is or should exist is by way of competition which involves the stronger surviving the stronger races starving the weaker races that would be a good thing right the closest thing that hitler comes to an idea of the good is that we actually do away with all our ideas of the good and revert to a competition in which some of us starve other other people now there are two important implications about this um for ethics which i think maybe sometimes get a little bit of short shrift the the first thing is that from this comes the nature of hitler's anti-semitism which is which is a very radical form i think probably the most radical possible form of anti-semitism because what hitler hitler's idea is that we might believe that there are things in the world besides a competition to starve we might believe that we might believe that there are reasons to show mercy or express solidarity or spare others if we believe any of those things for any reason be it christian mercy be it human solidarity be it working class solidarity be it a legal contract be it a constitutional regime be it the rule of law if we believe that there should be solidarity or reciprocity or mercy for any reason that means that our brains have been taken over by jews that's where hitler's anti-semitism begins the jews have the special capacity according to hitler of importing into our minds things that ought not to be there our minds ought to function in an essentially bestial mode these ideas that allow us to recognize anyone beyond our own race as hitler sees race beyond our race is human if we if we're able to do that that's precisely evidence of jewish presence in the world and therefore in our minds and the conclusion he draws is that the only way to get the jews out of our minds is to get them off the face of the planet and when that happens the earth and we on the earth revert back to the proper ecology because there will no longer be any source of what he sees as as as these perversions a second implication which is often overlooked i think has to do with with um with science um there are passages in in in mineconf which are perhaps understandably overlooked about the hybridization of grain about irrigation and about pesticides now you might think well why should we be reading hitler on pesticides the reason is that hitler's view about science is not i think what it's usually made out to be and certainly not what we might think if we read horkheimer and ordorno and go for that whole enlightenment story hitler's hitler's argument is that sure you know there are these technologies but they can't possibly save us from the necessity of endless competition for lendless for limited resources and if you think that they can says hitler then you have fallen for a jewish swindle so the idea that science is a universal right as opposed to a particular uh is for hitler one more jewish lie it's not that hitler doesn't believe in science he believes that germans will have better science than other people just like they'll have better states or better hygiene or better armies if something doesn't believe in science it's that he thinks that science is one more particularity if you think that science can save us all and thereby prevents the or removes the need for a particular struggle of race against race then says hitler you fallen for a jewish swindle so hitler thinks that we that science would be one more illusion that prevents us from falling into the struggle that we might otherwise that we should be falling into okay so where will this struggle take place now this idea now now we move from um ecology to to to to geopolitics or ecology to what hitler calls lebensrham or from ecology to history hitler looks at the world and says maritime empires are no longer possible but we know that land empires are possible we know that frontier empires are possible because the united states of america has shown us how it's done so with the help of slave labor you can conquer a continent and exterminate the native peoples this is the lesson that hitler draws from the united states of america he looks upon americans as being chiefly scandinavians and germans and he sees this as the kind of thing that scandinavians and germans can do and bemoans the fact that some of the best skin that he concludes that some of the best scandinavians and germans have been lost and they've shown that they're the best precisely because of what they were able to do on the north american continent i should say north america because canada is included in this as well not just the u.s so um what so so so this means that hitler looks um at the at the u.s as a model for what can be done in eurasia starting from germany you can push east and create and create a frontier empire um in which germans will achieve will achieve lebensraum now this layman's home business is also is also very important because it means a couple of things and it means a couple of things together which are politically significant the combination is very significant on the one hand lebensraum as i'm sure everyone knows is is an analogy taken from um taken from a darwinian struggle right that every species has its own ecological we would say niche right biotope like every every every species has its own place that's called lebensraum the german race because it's like a species needs to have its own space that space should be bigger right um and if you think about it that way leybin sram means literally a struggle for survival it's a struggle for the physical resources that your group needs to survive but there's also a second meaning of lebensraum which also refers back to united states and which is more apparent in the second book than than in the first it's easy to remember the title of hitler's second book because it's hitler's second book um so in the in the second in this and you know the title of his first one so now you've got it um so it the in in the second book more than the first he emphasizes that what he means by lebanese by struggle is not necessarily the struggle for physical survival but the struggle not to have a lower standard of living than anyone else and here again he refers to america and talks about how german housewives when they're thinking about how they live are not thinking do we have enough calories they're thinking are we doing as well as the americans and then he says something which sounds very much from like french theory of the 60s or 70s he says thanks to modern technology such as the radio it's no longer our own personal experience which sets our expectations for life it's what it's what we imagine that others have and and what follows from this is that levin's realm in addition to meaning physical survival also means lifestyle right it means living as well as everybody else or or slightly better and here again america is the marker as it were both objectively and subjectively america is what you can't fall behind you have to do as well as the americans because the americans are the ones who have who most clearly have have the future so um from and so you see how this works together politically because on the one hand you can arouse emotions having to do with survival while what people are really fighting for um is um you know is the is is the good right um you can amount you can arouse these emotions which are very violent even though in some sense what's really going on is you're struggling for for standard of living and people can disguise for themselves the fact that it's about standard of living by imagining this about survival i would i would submit that's a form of politics or a form of thinking about the world and its economic organization which is not entirely foreign to the way we live now all right um so in practice what hitler thinks is that the territory that's going to be conquered is the territory of ukraine ukraine is the black earth the title of the book ukraine is the most fertile soil in europe and so the notion is that if we can physically we can physically conquer this territory this is what's going to change change germany qualitatively um this is what's this is what's going to this is what's going to allow laban islam actually to be conquered and to and to be realized and the important thing about this as a war aim i'm just going to i'm just going to make this point very simply because it's so crucial to history holocaust if it's not for this war aim the holocaust would not have been possible because the war aimed to get german force into ukraine is what makes it is what makes it the case that german forces where jews live there aren't that many jews in germany there aren't the many jews in france and other places where hitler fought his incidental wars it was in it was in the east where jews actually lived there there are more jews in individual polish cities than there are in germany right um there are more jews than individual poor cities and there are on palestine at the time this is where jews actually lived in the former political settlement the western soviet union and the republic of poland also in hungary and czechoslovakia in lithuania and considerable numbers and so the war aim of going east is one of the necessary conditions of the holocaust without the idea of lebensvalm and without its specific geography there could not have been a holocaust because there wouldn't have been a reason to there wouldn't have been a reason to to fight the war there there's also of course the reason why hitler thinks the war is winnable which is that remember jews are responsible for all ideas of reciprocity not only communism but including communism and within this worldview the soviet union is a jewish state run by jews where jews exploit the slavs and so and jews of course only compete mentally right for hitler this is what's perverted about the jews they compete mentally by putting ideas in our minds but they won't compete physically so the moment that you begin an actual war you're breaking through their illusions and their state as he sees it the soviet union will immediately collapse the slavs no matter how bad you treat them are going to be grateful because you're going to be you're going to be liberating them from jewish rule and their bounty will automatically become yours hence the very unrealistic expectations about what was going to happen when the when germany and its allies invade the soviet union in the summer in the summer of 1941. and then of course and now i'm following um a very strong tradition in german historiography uh which begins with christian gerlach and which has been refined i think uh to a point which i think will be hard to surpass by christophe diekmann in his book about his his two magnificent volumes about germany and lithuania from that point the war really does start to become something like a war for subsistence it matters a great deal when the soviet union doesn't fall and when it doesn't yield bounty which it never does the germans get more food from belgium than they do from ukraine so it matters when the war doesn't go the way they expect when the soviet union doesn't collapse in 10 weeks it matters a great deal then that the german soldiers are ordered in the middle of september to feed themselves from the land this puts other people in the worst position it matters a great deal that before anti-semitic reasons jews are at the bottom of the list of those who are to receive food which means it becomes plausible not just in polls 9 later on but in lithuania very early to say it would make more sense to kill these people than to let them starve over the course of of of the winter in other words the the ecological vision of how the world is supposed to work in some sense comes closer to describing the way the world actually is once once the germans invade the soviet union and this this logic is not the only logic of course um but it is nevertheless an important logic i'll give you just a few more examples um one one telling one which all german specialists will know is the decision to liquidate the the warsaw ghetto in 1942 the calculation that himmler makes is that we are getting less from working jews than we would get from the food that we need to feed them in other words the calories are worse are worth more than the jews now before you think well that's just an economic calculation i want to put in your mind the idea that that's just an economic calculation is a horrifying thought because if it's just an economic calculation that means we've already accepted that the life of the people in question is not part of the calculation at all which was the case once you decide that the people in question are going to be removed from the earth one way or the other then it is just an economic calculation then you just think is their labor worth more than their than the calories we're giving them and if the answer is no at a certain point you kill them um and and that's that's the ratchet upon which the killing proceeds when the warsaw ghetto uprising happens in in the spring of 1943 the warsaw good uprising in which this man fell to takes takes part um what oh another little just detail when when warsaw jews are drawn to the umslog plots at the beginning the posters that are put up in the ghetto say come to the umslog plots there's bread and marmalade and you would think looking at it from our comfortable point of view how could they possibly have believed that or fallen for that and the answer of course is that if you drive people to desperation um by way of hunger if you can create a condition which really is a struggle for survival then people will be drawn by the promise of bread and marmalade even if they have every reason to think that that it's false that's what that world is like so that's the summer of 42 spring of 1943 the the warsaw gutter uprising takes place this man fell to is taking part on the revisionist side then there's also a coalition of left-wing and center parties who are fighting uh the german police commander who's meant to put it down is a man called jurgen stroup when strzop is asked later in prison what he was thinking about when his men were applying those flamethrowers to those to those bunkers um when feldshu was saying we were living in the earth what was schwab thinking about by strobes by strop's account he was thinking he was he was thinking of the milk and honey of ukraine the milk and honey of ukraine in other words at a time when we would be we would put all the emphasis and completely understandably on exactly what was happening to the to warsaw and its jews the destruction of the the largest jewish um city in in europe um destruction of the jews of that city the structure of the city itself but which trollope is thinking about is precisely this ecology he's thinking about ukraine in his mind the rationalization for what's happening here is that vision there still this is 1943 of of that of that front of that frontier of that frontier empire okay so that's ecology now let's take a moment and and think about and think about the state and then and then we can discuss for the state i'm going to tell you i'm going to tell you a a different story of a different a different jew it takes a bit longer it's not poetry it's prose her name is adena lipschitz and she is a young woman a polish-speaking jew from from warsaw who who's whose fate in the holocaust at least to the very last thing we're going to talk about is extremely typical and therefore revealing so she lives in the she lives in in warsaw this is we're going back to 1939 now so she lives in warsaw which is the most important jewish city in europe when germany invades on the first of september 1939 she does what about a quarter of a million jews in poland do which is she flees to the east what these people think they're doing is they think they're fleeing to eastern poland and they go and they're received by local jewish communities people try to find places for them um on couches or in addicts and then on september 17th the soviet union invades poland from the other side which makes of this quarter of a million or so jews people who are now under soviet power as the soviet union joined its german ally in in invading poland so she's so erena is in this little tiny place called visalsk which is close to the palesian marshes she's working she has she makes new friends they they try to look out for her that's what she's doing in june of 1941 when the germans displace the soviets and here we have we have something which is tricky but it's very important to remember which is when germany invades the soviet union what is it actually invading or where does the invasion start it doesn't start with the borders of the soviet union in 1939 it starts at the borders of the weight union in 1941 which means it starts with territories which until very recently had been poland or a little bit further north had been the baltic states the baltic states are only destroyed in 1940 so we're looking at the invasion the german invasion happens roughly a year after the soviet occupation and annexation of of of the baltic states so so the germans come in june of 1941 in september of 1942 erena is with the local jews as they are being rounded up and taken to pitts to be shot by it seems like a few germans and a larger group of locals which is completely typical of the time and place elena runs she she runs into the marshes and she tries to survive by eating berries and by end by eating mushrooms but she's a city girl this is not the kind of thing which is going to last for very long she decides that what she's going to do is stand out on a road put out her hand and ask someone for help so that's what she does um she goes out to a track she puts out her hand she sees someone over the horizon he gets closer it's it's one man and he's carrying a double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder she asks him for help now the thing about this story which may seem colorful is that it includes all of the basic elements of how the holocaust happened or at least how the holocaust started erena represents the largest group of jews who are killed in the holocaust polish jews she is in literally physically in the place where the holocaust starts the palesian marshes which is where himmler gives an order in july of 1941 for the vaf and ss for the first time to kill women and children which is as good at a moment as any to date the beginning of of the holocaust the weapon that she sees is the weapon which kills almost all the jews who die in the holocaust in in 1941 and roughly in roughly half of them for the rest of the holocaust these things are all completely normal but what we don't see in this picture are things that we might expect to see like we don't see nations for one thing erena is a polish-speaking jew who's befriended by yiddish-speaking jews in a part of the world where people speak dialects which you can say are bella russian if you're a bella russia and you can say ukrainian if you're ukrainian it's also famously the part of the world where the polish census the last one taken identified a very high number of people who refer to themselves as tutaishi or they would have said to teshni from here right this is that's what the palesian marshes were they were famously the place where nationality was least developed so it's very hard to find nations which is important for us because when we do the holocaust we do it with nations we do a german nation we do a jewish nation and then sometimes we might toss in another nation right there might be the holocaust in france and then we ask about the french or the holocaust in bohemia we ask about the czechs um we count on that we fall back on that we fall back on national paradigms and i would suggest we also fall back very heavily on national stereotypes which brings me to the germans there aren't any germans in this picture either at least they're not physically present at the moment where where the story ends and certainly where we don't what we don't have is we don't have some kind of bureaucratic machine right we don't have some we don't have something which is um which is which is taking her papers or classifying her or moving her through this cycle which in different ways hannah arendt or or zingman valmond describe where you're first dehumanized and then you're concentrated and then finally you're killed that's not happening here as it did not in general happen in the holocaust as a whole so we're far away from some of our images but we're very close to the typical experience of a jew in the holocaust and we're very close to a couple of other things which i think are very interesting one thing is we're very close to hitler's fantasy in pages one and two of mineconf about what the world is like she this jew is quite literally trying to survive by scratching mushrooms and berries out of the forest this is what hitler thought should be happening right this is what hitler this is what hitler expected and we're also close to something else which is the consensus of scholarship on how genocide happens so if you if we take a step away from the holocaust and take a step take a step away from history and look at what the social scientists have been doing with the concepts of ethnic cleansing and genocide for the last 25 years the consensus and there have now been not just studies but studies of studies on this the consensus is that genocide and ethnic cleansing take place in conditions of state failure of civil war of political chaos political function political dysfunction that the stronger associate the strong association is not authoritarian state kills its people the strong association is rather states fall apart and that creates the condition for genocide consider where we are we're in a place where the polish state was destroyed by the soviet state and then the soviet state was destroyed by the german state in the course of about two years in that sense it's typical now when confronted with social scientific generalizations that are backed by huge amounts of data and a generation of consideration historians generally have a response and historical response the response of colleagues is to say i know one counterexample right um that's what then and and this is interesting because historians do no counter examples we know examples of places where there was mass killing where the state didn't fall apart cambodia people's republic of china soviet union and what but what's interesting about those examples those historical examples is that in all three cases you're dealing with a very specific kind of state you're dealing with a party state where the main relationship between the individual and the polity was not through citizenship but which which was through a party which was meant to manage history and which could declare states of emergency now why am i dwelling on on that because if we look at the if we if we just for if we bracket the holocaust for just a moment and we consider those two other trends of trying to explain mass killing we actually see i think what was in fact unique about nazi germany what was unique about nazi germany from a scholarly point of view as it brings together both of the major scholarly traditions of explaining mass killing on the one hand germany was a state that destroyed other states and it was in the realm where germany destroyed other states that the holocaust took place on the other hand germany was a party state and the ideology of that party was precisely that zones of anarchy should be created where racial struggle will happen so nazi germany is special but it's special not in a way which has to throw us away from all the things we think we understand about mass killing but rather in a way which confirms both of the major arguments about mass killing and in fact brings them together so the way that i would understand the traditional narration of the nazi rise to power which i you know i i will just assume the landmarks are familiar to you hitler takes power in 33 there there are nuremberg laws there's there's area there's aryanization um there's the creation of concentration camps the way that i would understand all of that is not as the thing in itself because that does not cause the holocaust nor in my view could it have caused the holocaust i mean for the very simple reason that there aren't very many jews in germany but making the test a little bit higher that apparatus doesn't kill the jews of germany it gets many of them to flee but it doesn't kill jews in germany not until it goes abroad creates stateless zones and then sends those german jews to riga or to minsk or to wooj or to other places where the german army and ss has already wiped the slate as they like to put it clean right so that story from 33 to 39 cannot be the thing in and of itself i think it has to be understood in a different way that story of 33-39 is the creation of the potential to destroy other states that's what that is what is the ss the svss in the 30s are the guards in the concentration camps what's a concentration camp ask an american lawyer a concentration camp is a place where the law does not apply that's what a concentration camp is and that's why the ss are the guards because statelessness is their line of work when the ss become de facto in charge of the occupation in the east what that means is not metaphorically now this is like one big concentration camp germany does not acknowledge that the polish state exists germany does not acknowledge that the polish state has ever existed germany applies to poland the law that european empires if law is the right word traditionally apply to colonies which is to say this is not a state whose existence we recognize this is an unknown territory inhabited by unclassified peoples and therefore we may do as we wish this is very significant in practice when the germans come into poland they don't declare an occupation zone they start by calling it the general government of occupied poland then very quickly correct themselves because occupation implies that you're occupying something and their own doctrine was that there was nothing there to be occupied hence the odd term general government stands alone and then in the lower level what they do is they immediately declare the polish civil code null and void they declare that polish property rights don't apply which of course then sets off the the the chain of events that you would expect in the polish countryside if you take jews because they have no civil rights i'm going to emphasize this into ghettos and then no one has any property rights what's going to happen to their property and how and are people going to want those jews to come back those questions are very easy to answer so what i think that what i think the best way to understand 33 to 39 is is as a accumulation of potential of ideological but also of destructive potential to destroy other states and then if we run through the history of the holocaust we see how this confirms with as german power goes beyond germany so individual things like anschluss or munich which usually fall into the category of national history and are not generally attended to at least a great length in the history the holocaust take on new significance because anschluss no longer becomes an austrian trauma or an austrian moment of joy or an austrian thing to consider on schluss becomes the moment when all austrians lose citizenship that's what anchlous means right angelus is the moment where austria for a moment in march of 38 ceases to exist everything floats free it's a laboratory where you find out how people behave when all of a sudden jewish citizens stop being jewish students of austria because there is no austria the symbolic politics which we all know the jews scrubbing the streets mean this the jews aren't discovering the streets to be humiliated that's how we think about it because we think we like because we're semiotic but they're actually scrubbing from the streets something with deep political meaning they're scrubbing the word us from the streets because there was going to be a referendum about the continuation of the austrian state when a jew scrubs a strike from the streets the jew is being associated with the now defunct austrian state right and now that the austrian stay is defunct the jew is going to be defunct as well the same this the same argument then escalates as the germans destroy other states what happens in czechoslovakia why are the slovak jews the first one sent to auschwitz in large numbers because if you destroy the czechoslovak state as germany does in march 1939 there is a moment when all of the citizens float free you then can write a new constitution in which jews are second-class citizens and don't have property rights when they have no property rights very soon for the slovak government you can say why do we have all these immiserated jews shouldn't we be sending them somewhere and then you can negotiate with the germans to send them to auschwitz which is why the jews are the first ones to go the jews from slovakia the first ones to go in large numbers to auschwitz as jews there are other people there already they're the first large jewish group to go to auschwitz or to be more obscure why are the jews of the extreme east of czechoslovakia the first ones to be shot at in the first major mass killing in the holocaust that camianes podilsky in august of 1941 for the same reason the extreme east of czechoslovakia is given to hungary the jews on that territory are not made second-class citizens in general they're allowed to float free without citizenship at all then when germany invades the soviet union in 1941 the hungarian government takes advantage of the opportunity and expels these stateless quote-unquote refugees into the soviet union in the path of the germans these people who do not have citizenship at all because their state has been destroyed are then rounded up at communist paldinski along with local jews at the end of august 1941 and they're shot roughly 23 600 jews are shot so the statelessness the destruction of czechoslovakia leads integrally to this for and this was the first massacre not only in the holocaust but in the history of the world on this scale by shooting so this this is a turning point this showed this showed what could be done so as we move through the story of the germans destroying states we're also moving through the story of the escalation of the holocaust um i've already i've already talked about poland so what i'll say about poland is that it's very striking that destroying poland means that you can put jews in ghettos but even there you can't kill them in large numbers until germany invades the soviet union once germany invades the soviet union it learns that it can shoot jews in stateless zones close to where they live and then the question arises again what do we do with these jews in the ghettos and and that's when we get to himmler in in 1940 in 1942 i'm also going to say but only briefly because i want to take all the time that that the statelessness is not just some abstraction right the statelessness is a change in politics which affects how people live everyday lives i've given the example of property rights um i'll give i'll give another example which is double collaboration when the soviets invade the baltic states are are taken occupy annex the baltic states in 1940 there is a very large-scale local collaboration the nature of soviet rule is that you you involve a very large percentage of the population when the germans invade the baltic states um in or the when they invade what have become the soviet baltic republics in 1941 they get they elicit massive collaboration precisely from people who had worn uniforms under soviet rule why why i mean if you were in that situation the explanation is obvious the only way that you can as it were proved that you weren't a collaborator of the first regime is to collaborate with the second and this this very nice simple bit of human nature in dark times is understood by the invaders themselves um so the germans or their latvian and lithuanian language speaking collaborators actually say if you have collaborated with the soviets you can undo it by killing jews i don't say that as an excuse i say it as a description of a certain kind of politics which is only present when the state is destroyed or in this case destroyed twice i think it's it's telling and we can talk about it more but it's very telling that the holocaust only takes place on zones where the state has been destroyed and it starts in the zone the very precise zone where the state was destroyed twice there and and nowhere else there there and no one and nowhere else if we turn the description around and ask where can jews survive the answer is where they have citizenship if you have citizenship in a country that the germans recognize as a state they will not kill you if you're a british or an american jew and you find yourself in berlin you're not going to be killed you're a citizen of great britain they will only if you're a citizen of romania which carries out its own policy of the mass murder of jews and kills about 300 000 of them but if it's if it's in a month where let's after mid-42 after october 42 if the romanians are again recognizing jews as their own citizens which they do after the fall of 42 and you're a romanian jew who lived in france and you got sent to draw c which is the transit camp for auschwitz from france if you're there the germans will not take you and kill you they will not take you because the romanian government is currently recognized you as a romanian citizen right or look at other examples that are familiar bulgaria there's a nice story about how the bulgarians save their jews which is i mean there are some many qualifications with house one has to offer but the most important is that bulgarian jews who were citizens of bulgaria before the war generally did survive although they were kicked out of the capital and other things happened to them they generally did survive but in the territory which bulgaria gained as a result of the second world war there they took all the jews and sent them to auschwitz and we have the telegram from aikman where he writes he writes the bulgarian government and says you haven't given them citizenship have you and the response back is no we haven't given the citizenship okay then please right please deport so the can the connection is very clear i'll give you one more dramatic example which is denmark denmark also has a nice story about how the danes save the jews and of course that story is true although again there are many there are some questions to be asked here um you know when when verner best says that the jewish question has been resolved by all the danish jews going to sweden it wasn't all it wasn't only germans who saw it that way let's put it that way but the thing about denmark that i want to flag here is that the jews who they saved were danes danish jews who had danish citizenship if you if you were just a jew but you didn't have dana's citizenship they didn't save you they sent you back to germany every single one from 1934 they sent back to germany right and or to put it a different way um when the the the danes looked after their jews even even when those jews were in german were in german camps it was a question of citizenship but the point i wanted to make though was to compare denmark to estonia in denmark 99 of the citizens not the jews right but the citizens who are jews survive in estonia about 99 are killed which is a radical difference to have to explain and what i want to suggest is that the conventional things that we would fall back on like the nation simply cannot do the work here there's no reason to think that the estonian nation or the danish nation up until 1939 had any particularly different attitude towards towards jews there's no particular reason for example to think that danes were less anti-semitic than estonians were if anything it's on the contrary so if we're going to explain a radical variation 99 to 1 we need another we need another factor and for me that factor is that denmark was just that denmark was experienced the gentlest of the nazi occupations um and estonia experienced the most drastic possible combination which is a complete destruction by the soviet state destruction of the entire political apparatus murder and deportation of essentially the entire political class criminalization of taking part in the estonian state at any point after estonia independence and so on and so forth deportation of a serious part of the population and then a german occupation regime which was based in rooting up the soviet occupation apparatus and essentially an essentially parallel form or okay i'll give you one more example then i promise i stop the polish jews in in france in the holocaust in france more polish jews die than french jews not in relative terms in absolute terms polish anti-semitism was a real thing in the world and still is but you can't explain why more polish jews and french jews die in france with polish anti-semitism the explanation is that those polish jews did not have a state and the interesting thing is they understood this at the time as their problem when the polish state was destroyed in 1930 in september after september 1st what what did what did polish jews living in paris do they immediately went to the soviet consulate to try to get papers right because they had a sense i mean the saying in among polls and jews in the second world war was passport is what keeps body and soul together they had an intuition about this which we've lost they eventually they immediately went to the soviet council to try to get papers not because they love the soviet union but because they wanted to have papers and they very often got them but then of course when germany invades the soviet union in 1941 those papers no longer count because now germany doesn't recognize the soviet union as a state so those polish jews in paris don't have papers and it's very easy so when they're when they're drawn up um and taken to draw c they're all sent and and and and they all die okay which leads me to the end of the story about irena um and and and then i should leave some time for questions so edna lip sheets she puts out her hand she asks for help um and uh and miraculously the man walking down the path who meets her meets her eye and without batting an eye that's her phrase agrees to help he helps her and as as um as edna spends a few months with us with this with this man she learns some things about him she learns that he's a bootlegger that he's a smuggler and that he's a kind of he's a kind of anarchist under poland he had he had hidden communists because the communist party was banned in poland under soviet rule he had hidden polls because so many polls especially educated polls in the political apparatus were were deported to the gulag under soviet rule and then when the germans came he had helped jews and for him from his point of view it was all the same thing that was his particular political philosophy um so so edina records records all of this i have a friend who's a philosopher at alabama who reads my books and he generally just corrects the he just generally corrects the english but in this particular case on the margin when i got to the description of this bootlegger he wrote i want to party with this guy um which is the feeling i think that the description elicits in all of us like what a good person what an interesting person wouldn't we be like that in that situation but the point of this the point of this lecture is that there's a reason why people like that are exceptional in general the ecological consideration or the consideration of the destruction of normal political order meant that people did not behave like that it was the very exceptional person who despite changes in what i'm calling ecology or despite the void that replaced politics behaved behaved like that which is why this really will be my last remark which is why when i think about rescue um i think this is very important for us i'm now moving from history into politics and ethics a little bit but you'll follow me that it's very important when you think about rescue not to adopt the hollywood scenario of the one good person who at the end saves the day because by the time you get to the end it's already too late right by the time this man is helping irena many many jews have already been killed but also because in general one person can't save the day what the lesson i think of the causes of the holocaust of course it's the case as all the holocaust museums say and i help them say it when we talk about it of course it's true that the individual attitude of the individual person matters an awful lot at crucial moments i would dare say at moments like the ones we're in now but you get past those moments into places where there are much larger forces at stake these ecological or these anti-or these anti-political forces which seems to me that when we think about rescue or the political um consequences of rescue the political mean of rescue the political mean of rescue would involve trying to prevent us getting into situations that are comparable to this in in the first place i'll leave it at that thanks [Applause] thanks [Applause]

Channel: UCD - University College Dublin

Views: 41,211

Rating: 4.7383723 out of 5

Keywords: UCD, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, UCD - University College Dublin, myucd, ucddublin, Timothy Snyder, Black Earth, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Yale, Yale History, History Department, Yale University, Hitler, SS, Memory and the Holocaust, Tony Judt, World War II, The Second World War, Jewish Primary Sources

Id: Pmgs_CWxMHc

Length: 49min 47sec (2987 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017