The Holocaust as a Global History

dear Timothy Snyder ladies and gentlemen dear friends I would like to welcome you all to the Pierre du Bois annual lecture organized by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in partnership with a foundation Pierre du Bois police auditor present here in Geneva it is a great privilege honor and a pleasure to welcome Timothy Snyder his talk today is entitled the Holocaust as a global history Timothy Snyder is a world renowned historian professor of history at Yale University his book blood lands Europe between Hitler and Stalin published three years ago has been translated into over 25 languages has won many awards and has become a best-seller professor David iridonia from the Graduate Institute will introduce Timothy Snyder to all of us in a moment this is also a moment of deep personal emotion for me the foundation bears the name of my husband Pierre Dubois who was a historian and was professor at the Graduate Institute for the last fifteen years of his life he left us prematurely infinitely sadly more than six years ago he was 64 the foundation was created in accordance with his wishes and aims to promote and support research on current history we work in close collaboration in partnership with a Graduate Institute we have developed a whole array of activities such as precisely the annual lecture which brings us together today the lecture is taking place for the first time in the maison de la Paix in this magnificent new building the new home of the Graduate Institute which was inaugurated just a month ago thank you very much Timothy Snyder for coming to Geneva today and I would now like to give the floor to the video doneö professor of international history at the Graduate Institute chef's that you yo share colleague madama mister shared yet ashurina it is my privilege to introduce professor Timothy Snyder and his new research the Holocaust has a global history as we heard Timothy Snyder his professor at a history of history at the Yale University specializing in history of Central and Eastern Europe he received his BA from Brown University and his doctorate from the University of Oxford has held fellowships in Paris worship and at Harvard where he was an academic scholar as we heard they published bloodlines Europe between Hitler and Stalin in 2010 and it's a book that has won many words and was a best-seller in four countries I will not mention the very impressive list of articles and books Timothy Snyder has edited suffice to say that he's the at work on four books at the same time a study of the Holocaust a biography of Marx a global history of Eastern Europe and a family history of nationalism tonight though he will talk about Holocaust as a global history since professor Snyder's presentation is on an ongoing project which we will discover together tonight let me say a few words about bloodlines a book that the international history students and I read together the book brings together a number of events that historians dealt with separately Soviet terror the genocide of the Jews Stalin killings Hitler killings the premise of the book is simple almost all of the German killings and a considerable proportion of Stalin's killing took place in a relatively compact territory that Snyder names the bloodlines these killings took place in a relatively short-term period of time from 1933 to 1945 when both Hitler and Stalin wearing power the book observes that approximately 14 million non-combatants mainly women and children were killed in the blood lands blood lands were the lands between Berlin and Moscow and it was not Empire it was not nation-state these lands were contested regarded as important because of agriculture because they were the homeland of European Jews and tonight timeles neither will tell us more about the genocide of European Jews now to conclude my short introduction I would like to quote what second-year students of the master in international history wrote about blood lands they have reviewed very carefully and of course very critically according to one student it is the unit of analysis that set Snyder apart from so many stories of this period another student said this is an interesting human geography according to another student Snyder ate an anchor to atone acidic acid mo civil apparent waka on sank della Memphis on historian de la fille knows reveille free militaire la voz de terre the song which is the French translation of blood lands right and other students they are able to do so Natasha particular kid on electoral a sensation do i do Kuvera passer open kill qui a sybian Canet Putin Schneider no Ferrando Alma nove a solo phone to tragedy kill decree on days I treat a son originally tempo V Anderson attitude effect on Deborah graphic ideology Lata pawn visible Mon plaisir as you have a claim oh oh no no see director party dear malleable continued de Souza the push is a hitman so JC pasando chief o bryd at this example and little pathetic force on Parliament director sampling yet you continue a human is Eleanor vertiginous the more home country or fill the bulge one student asks what about local players what about international internal politics re of Poland of Ukraine in a similar vein another student wonders how internal ethnic or national identities play a part in this twisted tale yet another student wonders about the comparative endeavor the periodization the geographic boundaries the nature of data Snyder's uses this book now as you can guess we are terribly ex sided to know more about the Ala Coast as a global history the topic of your presentation tonight a topic that looks as important intriguing and innovative as your previous research to which it also is certainly intertwined and related without further ado Timothy Snyder the floor is yours thank you very much for these very kind introductions to say that I'm writing four books at the same time is another way of saying that I don't actually know what I'm writing the the it's it's safe to say that you're writing four books at a time because then there's a pretty good chance that the book you actually write will be one of the four that you claim to be writing I face now the additional complication and beginning this lecture that the introduction it has to do with the previous book so I'm going to ask you those of you who read the book or those of you who know the book Teddy song to consider whether I'm contradicting myself in the lecture to follow because what I'm going to do in this lecture is apparently the opposite of what I didn't add a song what I'm going to do in this lecture is rather than concentrate upon all of the mass murders I'm going to be talking about one of them and rather than concentrating on a territory I'm going to be making a case for global history now you won't be surprised to learn that I think the two approaches are not contradictory but complementary this is this lecture is not going to be from my point of view anyway a revision of everything I've done before but it's worth the question is worth bearing in mind because I think that as we make this move to global history a move which is very sympathetic to the the concerns of the present day a move which is very sympathetic to those of us who study or have studied international relations or international political economy we have to be able to make some kind of connection between the global and the regional or the global and the local and interestingly enough I think some of these questions that were posed at the very end of the introduction about the Polish state or about ethnic politics actually can only be resolved if you look at a higher level rather than a lower level I'll be happy to say more about that later now the Holocaust has a global history there are a number of ways a number of fairly straightforward ways that the Holocaust can be seen as a global history one of them of course is that it took place during a world war without which in various ways it would have been impossible there are two other ways though in which the Holocaust is a global history and these are the two ways that I'll be writing about in the book that I'm conceiving now the first is as a matter of Hitler's mind that is as a matter of intellectual history that the Holocaust happened in part because of the way his Hitler understood the earth the way Hitler understood the entire planet the second way which I'm only going to hint at as we move through and which is in fact the next chapter of this book what I'm talking about now was really the first chapter has to do with the global concept of sovereignty if I were going to compress the argument of the book into a simple two-part sentence it would be that Hitler had a view of the world in which we we everyone on the planet faces a desperate ecological situation which can only be resolved by the total removal of the Jews but in practice the Jews could only be removed eliminated killed in so varis insofar as sovereignty in a very traditional sense was also removed what I'm going to be talking about today is the first part of this what I'm going to try to do is make a case that the Holocaust must be global history because what Hitler how Hitler understood the Jews had everything to do with how he understood the entire world now I'm going to insist upon this and I'm going to insist upon it at a very fundamental level because what I mean by global history is not that one can make connections to things around the world I don't mean something trivial like that everything has to do with everything else I don't mean that I happen to know you know obscure languages which allow me to write up other parts of the world what I mean is something much more fundamental what I mean is that I believe the basic is the my grifone working can you can you hear me okay thank you um I have to stoop write historians should be short because if you're short then you never have to stoop for the microphone if you're tall and you always do so if I'm if I'm leaning over it's because I'm interested in being closer to you but also so that I can get the microphone um well what I mean is that the most fundamental level of Hitler's thought is the planetary level the most fundamental level of his thought has to do with the planet as such and that when one understands that level of his thought then the rest of his thought the the less fundamental levels then makes sense so to begin then from the very beginning when Hitler writes about the Jews or anything else Hitler constantly uses the phrase on this planet or on this earth when he speaks about what he takes to be the only thing which is really happening on this planet it the struggle for its territory he defines the he defines history itself he defines the events that happen on the planet as competition for and I'm quoting I'm only going to quote Hitler unless I say otherwise competition for the surface area of a precisely measured place that is the surface of the earth the competition is for daily bread Todd Lucas Walt with a freight with this phrase of course he's immediately inverting what everyone would have understood to be the lord's prayer that is you must be the commandment is you must struggle for your daily bread regardless of the consequences for others so it's an inversion of divine commandment and this is not a connection I'm making it's Hitler's own connection Hitler writes if I can accept a divine commandment it's this one thou shalt preserve the species so at the very fundamental level at the most fundamental level Hitler has an idea about the planet the planet is a place where races compete and indeed are morally obliged to compete for control of surface area and what this competition means again he doesn't imply this he's very straightforward is that the strong who can control the surface area of the earth the strong races will propagate and the weak will be starved on starvation is a very central category for Hitler so the law of the jungle as Hitler sees things is the only law it's the most beautiful law it's the only ethical have in the universe it's all it's there this observation is presented in ethical terms it's presented in aesthetic terms but it's also presented in scientific terms hitler's is describing the planet as though this description were a matter of science at one point he says the law of racial struggle on the earth is like the law of gravity in the universe so it's about as basic as fundamental as something can be now when you make this sort of move that Hitler has made and you'll notice that I'm taking Hitler seriously as a thinker I take him seriously as a thinker not because you know I would compare him to Kahn but because his ideas had serious consequences and it's at our peril that we say oh he was just a madman or you know he couldn't really use a typewriter or whatever it might be he could actually think and his worldview was actually coherent and it's very coherence was dangerous so when you make this kind of move when you say that that nature is is it that nature is the same thing as politics when all politics really is is the kind of description of a struggle among races you've done something rather important you've basically reversed the entire history of Western political thought yeah in the history of Western thought as all of you will know I mean we're in Geneva after all right as all of you will know in the history of Western political thought the state of nature is a hypothetical condition from which we begin to reason about the way institutions actually should be the way States should actually be people should actually behave that's the way that the state of nature works in thought in philosophy and normative political thought what Hitler does is reverse that the state of nature is not a hypothetical from which you begin to think the state of nature says Hitler aesthetically morally politically and in every other way is the way the world actually is there is nothing beyond that what is an illusion says Hitler is in fact the whole tradition of political thought that's the illusion the idea that there was or could be any kind of social contract from the state of nature that's the illusion that's the thing you can toss away that's the thing which is which is false and harmful always a loser II always malicious so Hitler is a kind of biological or ZOA logical anarchist what he takes to be real is not thinking about the state what it takes to be real is only the struggle now this is you know as you will know this is a fairly straightforward 19th century way of seeing the world even Darwin in in the descent of man wrote at some future period not very distant the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world for Hitler this thought that the civilized races will exterminate the others is the only thought there is no thought beyond that there's no politics beyond that there's no politics beyond nature no nature beyond politics which has the implication um that sort of existentially it has the implication that only the strong races truly exist only the strong races have a future and if only the strong races have a future that only the strong races have a present the other races thinks Hitler they're doomed pain starvation and death and so in effect there just haunting this planet they're just cluttering up the habitat and I use the word habitat advisedly because Levens the proper translation of Levens all is habitat the word Levens was created in German to cover the word in French sbo top right it was created to cover the word habitat so the other races the inferior races are just there polluting the habitat they're just in the way they're not really don't really exist any in any meaningful sense now to return to this as theology one more time and then I'll abandon it what follows from this is that we humans do have an original sin but our original sin is not of the soul it's not of the will our original soul is of the mind the unfortunate thing about us our weakness is that we can think and in thinking we can recognize other people who think and thereby recognize other people as being part of some kind of abstract community with us that says Hitler is our problem that's our weakness that's the thing to which we may not yield so the original sin for Hitler is not a matter of violence or a matter of sex as it is in the Bible it's a matter of thinking and but as in the Bible original sin does come from somewhere if someone brings it and in Hitler's conception the the bearer of the sin the articulator of this and the propagator of the sin is the Jew the serpent who brings knowledge so to speak is the Jew so as Hitler said over and over again insofar as I restrain the Jazz insofar as I restrain the Jew I'm doing the work of the Lord so this is how the Jew comes into Hitler's thinking at this very fundamental level at this level of description of the planet which as you see slips very easily to being in a kind of metaphysical description of the way of of good and evil the way that the Jew slips into this nature is that the Jew is the person or the Jews are the group it's hard to say because Hitler always says d'you de right the Jew by which he means not an individual Jew but he means the Jew kind of collective a horrible collective what the Jew is able to do says Hitler is the Jew is able to bring into the world these thoughts these horrible thoughts these things that allow us to identify with each other even though we should not identify with each other we should only be identifying with people of our own race that's the only natural thing so the Jews have an ability which is in effect superhuman they can do one thing which no one should really be able to do they can bring in thinking to the world they're responsible for abstract political thought so from Hitler's point of view the Jews are not and this is I think a source of a lot of misunderstanding not among specialists particularly but in general the Jews are not actually subhuman they're not subhuman it would be closer to say that they're superhuman but that's not quite right either from Hitler's point of view and from the point of view of several leading Nazis the Jews are not really human at all they're para human they appear to be human they have some features of being human but they have some weaknesses that humans don't have they also have some strengths that humans don't have the only thing that can be done with Jews given this situation given their power over our minds is to get rid of them in some way that follows fairly obviously so um there's a historical source of all of this of course and I won't spend much time on it because it can get complicated but the fundamental historical source of all of this is the outcome of the first world war Hitler was of course not the only person to be shocked by German defeat all Germans innocent in essence were shocked by by by German defeat you can take your most righteous German you can take you know you can take a female Jew who was writing about solidarity and will later be killed by the Nazis I'm thinking of edit Stein you can take pretty much anyone you want and during the war they will be they were German nationalists they were shocked that Germany could possibly lose Thomas Mann is another classical example but Hitler takes the German defeat just as a kind of surprise and not just as a wound to national pride but it's a kind of key to everything else if the Germans could lose this war there is there must be a kind of metaphysical explanation and the fact that the Germans lost the word during a blockade the fact that the Germans lost the war while going hungry was for him particularly important now if the Jews are a problem then the Jew then there must be an obvious solution and one of the things you'll notice in Hitler's thought as I as I lay it out for you is that every time he lays out a problem which seems insoluble the problem seems to contain its own solution in this case Hitler was a very typical German style thinker so if the Jews bring this problem Hitler writes if nature designed the Jew to be the cause of the decline and fall of the Nations it provided these nations with the possibility of a healthy reaction as Hitler continues people that is rid of its Jews return spontaneously to the nap to the natural order now something important to notice here this is not us this is not a script or a screed for ethnic cleansing it's not about purifying the nation of some minority that's a very minimalist reading of these words and I think it's incorrect it the reading I think is correct is much deeper that if the Jews are removed then the universe is restored to its previous harmony right if the Germans remove the Jews that's good for the Germans things Hitler but it's actually a kind of service for everyone else it's something which the Germans are doing in a way a kind of sacrifice that the Germans are carrying out for everyone else because in removing the Germans it's for the Jews it's not just the Germans we'll have ethnic purity that's not really so important what's important is the struggle what's important is the struggle the service that the Germans will be performing by removing the Jews is allowing nature to return to this state of struggle which is the only good the only objectively good thing in the universe Germans will be doing this and in so doing they will be objectively allowing the good to rise and objectively allowing the bad to fall to the bottom the way Hitler sees it so there's a couple of interesting things about this which I want to draw your attention to before we move forward one of them is where are so if the Jews are not the intervention which they're not I mean occasionally the word intervention is applied to Jews but in Hitler's thinking that's not really how it works if the Jews are not the intervention then who is well pretty much everyone else in Europe I mean there are a lot of intervention in Europe as it turns out the Slavs are intervention and the Slavs of the largest linguistic group in Europe so most people in Europe are in fact intervention on so there is a kind of natural because there's the people to the east or largely speaking the intervention and if Germany conquers them it's going to be colonizing but here's the thing I want you to notice which is very special about about Hitler's approach to the world I think perhaps unique maybe one of you will correct me but because of this logic that the Germans should be out competing everyone else and if they're not it's because the Jews are stopping them because of this everything the Germans do to win back the rightful place in the world will be simultaneously colonizing that is it will be what was seen at the time as the normal healthy impulse of Europeans to dominate others but at the same time it will also be decolonizing because the entire world is run by Jews and insofar as you remove Jewish power your decolonizing so the two major political impulses in Europe in the 20th century colonization and decolonization are simultaneously at work in mine Kampf and Hitler's other writings you have both the impulse that you dominate others and the impulse that you're liberating the world at the same time ok now the next basic thing about this thinking which I want to get clear to you before I start going into the practical side of it Hitler has a very particular understanding of science one which is is highly resonant I think today at least in my native country Hitler's idea of science is that science gives you a portrait of things if you understand the world scientifically that means you see that there's a natural struggle again the natural struggle is a law like gravity science gives you a picture of the way things really are it gives you a timeless problem the timeless problem is the struggle of species and races and races to control food supply what science does not give you as a paintbrush it gives you a portrait it doesn't give you a paintbrush it doesn't allow you to change the world and this is something on which Hitler insists with a particular ferocity which goes completely unnoticed I think in readings of mine Kampf in the second book because no one who reads these books is actually concerned about about things like agra agra cultural technology which says everything about us and nothing about Hitler we don't care about agricultural technology because we come from a world of Plenty this means we can't possibly understand where Hitler was coming from or interwar Europe in general Hitler goes goes point by point in meine Kampf and in the second book to explain how irrigation isn't going to work hybridization of corn isn't going to work pesticides are not as good as you think they are irrigation is going to have the effect you think it is why does he dwelt on these things why is he dwelling on these things because Hitler's in Hitler's view the struggle for land and the struggle for food is simply the way the world has to be if science offered a solution then we'd be in a completely different world where struggle wasn't so necessary so from from the point of view of actual post of actual European history what's fascinating about this is that Hitler point by point denies all of the things which are actually going to happen hybridization irrigation fertilizer and pesticides actually created the world that we're living in all of us now to the extent that we don't notice them they change the world in what would have been Hitler's lifetime if he hadn't committed suicide during the war that he started in order to get food right so the there's something really fundamental here and what's fundamental about it is that if science actually could solve our problems then science would be universal and there aren't Universal ideas Universal ideas about food and agriculture as Hitler says I don't have to draw this out of his writings Universal ideas about about food and agriculture as Hitler says are a Jewish swindle there are no scientific solutions there are only technological solutions now that may seem like a kind of sophistic distinction technology on the one side and science on the other but I mean something very particular by it I think defensible for Hitler technology technique was something which races had Germans have better technique because they're better people right that just follows science as something which is universal is Jewish and that's a distinction which in practice you can't make but it was it was Hitler's attitude and what this means in practice not just for the Germans but for everyone if you don't believe in science you can still believe in using the technology that you have to take things from other people which was Hitler's attitude par excellence but of course not only not only Hitler's attitude what's special about Hitler's attitude is that in order to make the normal rules of life apply in order to get back to this portrait of nature as a choice supposed to be the Jews have to be gotten rid of and the way that you get that get rid of the Jews and here's how the Jews are weak is that you force them to play by the rules that everyone else has to play by the Jews are strong says Hitler because they can create rules what are these rules by the way Christianity constitutionalism the rule of law the state socialism communism capitalism the free market anything which allows us to recognize each other on a criterion which is not racial is a Jewish construction in practice Hitler became less radical about this when he had to govern for example he had to give up on Christianity for the most part but for Hitler in principle any relationship including a contractual relationship was by definition Jewish because any relationship which allow to function on understanding which was not racial was invented by Jews it's a very radical way of looking at the world but so Jews are very good at that right because there are lots of states and constitutions and laws and there is capitalism there is capital and there is communism and there is liberalism and so on and so forth so Jews are very good at this sort of thing apparently but if you force them to play by the normal rules of struggle then they'll do very badly hence the idea that the way to get rid of the Jews is to put them in some kind of black hole put them in some place on earth where they have to struggle and for the most part for most of the years that we're talking about the dominant idea was Madagascar an island off the coast of Africa when that proved impossible then Siberia was the next idea after that someplace where which Hitler called and and I think with this is very telling for the overall argument an anarchic state on an island so put the Jews someplace where the normal rules that is Anarchy obtained and then see what happens to them now I am trying to make the case that this is the fundamental level of Hitler's argumentation this planetary level and it's fundamental not only in a sense that everything falls from it logically it's also fundamental in the sense that whenever there's a moment of stress Hitler will fall back upon this idea as for example crucially in December of 1941 um so the next level of thinking from the planetary is what I would call the global so when I say that Hitler sees the planet like this I don't mean that he doesn't see other things happening in the world I don't mean he doesn't recognize for example that there is an international political economy he does recognize that there's an international political economy what Hitler thinks about this international political economy is that if you understand it properly you'll find your way back to the planetary level so how does this work in fact well hitler's portrait of the planet is as though we were just animals and what we always do in life is scratch food from the ground there's aware that this is not actually the way that we function he's aware of this thing that we call globalization he's aware of the interdependence of world markets he's perfectly aware of that and and this is very important it's hugely important for all the things that Hitler says about starvation and so on food access to food if you think about Hitler just as a planetary thinker then you could think okay we're like to use Hitler's own compare comparisons we're like wolves or were like ants so we're like the other species that you need and we're just after food in a very simple sense now if that's all Hitler meant then Germany would be fine because people in Germany weren't literally starving I mean even during the blockade they weren't literally starving Hitler has something else in mind which is much it's much more contemporary for us and therefore it's much more disquieting and therefore we don't think about it what Hitler has in mind is that the current arrangement of the international political economy doesn't give Germans exactly the kind of food supply that they might wish that's different from claiming that's that the Germans are actually starving but Hitler conflates the two so Hitler understands that Germany is literally self-sufficient in food in the sense that if you pulled the workers out of the factories and put them to work in the fields you'd have plenty of calories Hitler understands that uhm what he wants is for Germany to be rich he wants Germany to keep the factories to continue to industrialize to keep all that technique but also to have enough soil that you can have agricultural modernity that you can have meat in particular and I realize is ironic being said there was a vegetarian so please nobody asked the question but that the the Hitler understood that Germans wanted meat that there's a certain there's a threshold in social history across when you get meat and apparently you never go back again Hitler understood that now it's a serious point because in order to have meat in Germany you have to import animal feed from other countries all of this depends upon the international exchange which Hitler understood so Hitler nurse stood the Germany's an international political economy he understood that this means vulnerability so when Hitler talks about German self-sufficiency and he talks about agrarian utopias he doesn't mean anything crazy like Germans going back and all becoming peasant farmers he doesn't mean anything like that he means Germany preserving industrial modernity but going somewhere else and getting lots of territory so that can have a higher agrarian standard of living at the same time now in order to do that you have to somehow get out of the British system and you can't do it by beating the British because the British have the only meaningful Navy in the world except for the Japanese I suppose you can't you have no colonies so the only way to do this is to somehow get us get beside the British you can't do it on the high seas you have to do it somewhere on the land okay what follows from that well like everything else that Hitler says um and it's sort of like you know elementary school Hegelian ISM that he that he that he follows um there's bad news and there's good news the bad news is that the entire world political economy is structured for the British convenience that's the bad news it's structure for the British convenience because the British are the only ones who have a fleet that can actually guarantee the supply of food and because they're the only ones who have such a fleet naturally they're in favor of free trade right if I'm the only one who has the power naturally I will be for an idea in which none of you has any power now Hitler's critique of the British here is of course exactly right by the way um so so Hitler thinks that that free trade is is just a sham fortunately but that's the bad news the good news is one doesn't actually have to challenge the British one can get around this problem by controlling territory and the reason why we know this can happen is because it's just been done it's been done in the last two generations by people who Hitler regards as being very close to Germans in fact to Hitler regards as being Germans at least insofar as they do things that are positive and that is the Americans so the second part of Hitler's global view has to do with the United States of America the United States of America is a great source like the British of both anxiety but also of reassurance about what's possible in politics first the anxiety let me pull this point about what food actually means a little bit further Hitler understands and again it's unnerving he understand this because it makes him sound a French theorist of the 1970s rather than like someone we would prefer to forget Hitler understands that globalization is a matter of emotional and symbolic vulnerability in other words he understands that with food it's we're not just animals scratching food from the ground and also were not just societies who need to have a certain number of calories he understands that demand for food or demand for products having to do with food is reflexive it has nothing to do really with how hungry we are but has everything to do with what other people are being I will now sell you something from Hitler which ok I gave it a way that it's from Hitler I need to set up this lecture in some way so that it sounds like it's from you know it's from both way out but it's from Hitler through modern technology and the communication it enables international relations between peoples have become so effortless and intimate that the Europeans often without realizing it take the circumstances of the American life as the benchmark for their own life right that's Hitler in 1928 so um this means that okay it means something important for technology because that's imagine that you have the best technology in the world the Americans also have the best technology in the world and if what you mean by Laytonsville is a standard of living that's the same as the American standard of living then you have to have as much land as the Americans do that's a way in which science can't win for you right if you have the best science and the Americans have the best science and the Americans have 10 times more land than you do they're gonna have a higher standard of living and you lose because it's all been it's all been defined as relative now that here's where I want to make a very important point about the word Leben's file this crucial word Leben's well which Hitler himself only learned about in 1924 in the middle of writing mine Kampf and to which he gives an interestingly ambiguous meaning but very importantly ambiguous meaning on the one hand as I already said laban small means habitat that's how the word enters the German language it means habitat it means the ecological knee should have the bias species on the other hand Lebensraum is become furtive living Lebensraum is that place in your house where you can stretch out and look at nice paintings have a nice me own maybe read a book that's also Levens well those seem like two very different ideas but I would suggest that the importance and the political cleverness of Hitler's idea of Levens realm is that he means both of these things at exactly the same time in other words he motivates all the emotional energy and political clarity of the idea of us struggling against the rest of the world so we don't starve but what the struggle is really meant to provide is not just a standard of living which is above starvation what it's really meant to provide is a standard of living that's ego no Donal don't look at your laptop and laugh please pretend like you're listening Thanks um the what he's looking what he's what he's looking for is not just a snare of living which is slightly above starvation but one which is equal to what the Americans have that's what so Layton's film combines these two apparently very different ideas in other words it's not that we have to kill tens of millions of people just so we can be alive it's that we have to kill tens of millions of people so that we were as prosperous as the Americans which is something very different right but it's packaged as though it were this exactly the same thing so Hitler reasons so let me just quote from Hitler to make this clear Hitler writes the prospects for the American people re there was a Freudian slip the prospects for the the prospects for the German people are bleak which is then followed by neither the current Levens calm nor that achieved through a restoration of the borders of 1914 permits us to lead a life comparable to that of the American people so prospects being bleak means we don't have the American standard of living or Robert ley who was in charge of relations with a working class he says and I think a very telling quotation what the workers need is more habitat ok more Lebensraum more habitat what follows from that the workers need more habitat more culture more beauty without these the race will perish so the notion of survival the notion of perishing and survival has been related to things like culture and beauty for the working class right so we have worked our way or Hitler has worked his way in in a kind of achievement which I think is very important for modern politics and propene us to understand how Hitler is practicing modern politics and how he's not so distant from us as we might think in some ways Hitler has worked as wet his way from the survival of the fittest to the survival of the fattest the survival of the fittest and the survival of the fattest turn out to be exactly the same thing in Hitler's thought now this is where America comes in as a source of anxiety right because obviously no one combines a survival of the fittest with a survival of the fattest better the United States of America then as now right in IDN practice so it's a source of anxiety but it's also a source of a positive model the Americans have shown that this can be done the Americans have shown this is now Hitler's point of view that Scandinavian and Germanic settlers can conquer an entire continent exterminating the local people with the help of slave labor that's what that's what the American experience has shown this is a four-hit from Hitler's point of view this is a very reassuring example it shows that a land Empire a frontier Empire can actually be achieved now moving on to the third part of Hitler's global view of things where is all this land where is the land that's going to allow Germany to become a second United States of America where is the land which is going to allow Germany to circumvent the British stranglehold on the world let me make a slight side expedition here to Africa because I think this is rather important there are two continents that are being colonized while Hitler was growing up the North America obviously and Africa and these these two continents and their colonization are on the minds of Europeans in the 1880s 1890's Hitler as a young boy as everyone knows was reading Karl my and also playing at African Wars Germany as we also know had colonies in Africa in the 1880s 1890's which it lost with the first world war now what I don't want and they did all kinds of dreadful things in Africa but not very differently than the Europeans what I don't want to say is that the Germans colonized Africa therefore there was a holocaust I don't actually think that makes any sense what I do want to do is make a different sort of connection the connection I want to make is between America and Africa between in the normal way of looking at colonization the worst thing that the Germans did in in Africa was a certain policy of extermination of the the hero and and at another another tribe in South West Africa where they drove them all to an island called shark island they let them die there that's pretty much about as bad as it got but the person who carried this out a general calm folk called von Trotta said something really interesting about this he said in justifying this policy of extermination he said the natives must give way look at America so the the point I'm not saying all this just to be incredibly self-critical about the United States I leave that to my americanist colleagues because that's their only theme right so I don't want to intrude on that but I'm saying this because it gets across a kind of universal sense about what colonization was thought to be in the late 19th century now this is relevant directly for Europe in the early 20th century and in a way which is very hard for us Americans to grasp but I'm going to see how well it works on Europeans what happens is that references to Africa not so much practices but references to Africa get mixed up with references to Eastern Europe in the 19-teens 1920s 30s and 40s on in Germany during the First World War there's talk of replacing polish migrant laborers with African migrant laborers for example on the occupation of western Germany by the French just many of you will know a huge to do was made of the fact that the French used African colonial troops so so Africa and Europe get mixed up a bit in the minds of many of many Europeans certainly Hitler himself Hitler so my point is not that Hitler wasn't a racist against black people Hitler was of course a racist against black people everyone knows that he was obsessed with the French rising their blood when Germany invades France they murder 1,500 Senegalese servicemen people in Germany who have African parents are sterilized etc etc etc what's interesting about this racism though and this is the part where I have yet to actually succeed in explaining it to any American so I'm counting on you here what's interesting about those of you who aren't Americans I'm I'm counting particularly on the Canadians by the way as one must um the what what Hitler was what Hitler did was he regarded what we Americans would see as white people as being African right not African in the sense that they look differently it's not about to see the thing is this is the important thing the racism is not about pigmentation it's not about the external characteristics which which at least Americans obsess about Ukrainians could be and were Ukrainians were called other Europeans were you were called by the names that colonial eyes African peoples were called other Europeans were also subhuman they were Africanized so to speak in the way that Hitler talked about him and though in the way that other leading Nazis talked about them as well and that word that word in particular is rather important here because that was the default now I'm trying to lead you to the territory that Hitler wanted in an unexpected way because the way that Hitler thought about Ukraine which is of course the breadbasket which is of course the colonial booty that Hitler thinks is going to change everything the way that Hitler thought about Ukraine has to do not just with the fact that Ukraine happened to be next door it mattered that he was able to look at Europeans and see in other Europeans colonial subjects and matter that he was able to look at other Europeans and see in Europeans lunch I mentioned people who are going to be exterminated people whose only destiny was to starve or to work for the racial masters that's very important in other words there's a classic colonial logic going on here wherever you need something the people who inhabit that territory are inferior now we're used to thinking that that's a totally natural way for European colonial the rest the world right the what's of interest here as it is that it's being applied to Europe itself and thoroughly enthusiastically without any reservations whatsoever so Hitler says on the one hand I need the Ukraine so that no one can starve us again in the like in the last war and what's intolerable about Ukraine again Hitler it's intolerable that the life of the peoples of the continent depend upon England Ukraine will one day be the granary of Europe he goes on it's inconceivable that hire people painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it while amorphous masses who contribute nothing to civilization occupy infinite tracts of soil that is one of the richest in the world he goes on the Slav is a born a born mass of slaves crying after its master and so on and so on right so the basic idea is that Ukrainian soil is what's going to transform the world Ukraine is that place which once Germany holds it Germany can free itself from the world political economy Germany can have its higher standard of living but it's inhabited by people who don't deserve what they have so again as with all of Hitler's political arguments there's good news and there's bad news and then there's more good news I mean if you're inside Hitler's mind it's good news the good news is this land is here now someone is running this land and from Hitler's point of view the people who are running this land the Soviet Union are Jews and this is that the perhaps the most important connection of all because this is where the whole worldview starts to cohere as a program of action the fact that the Soviet Union is a Jewish state from Hitler's point of view is an opportunity because and again by the way the idea that the Soviet Union was a Jewish state it's one of these many ideas which Hitler held along with lots of other people but just took the idea to much more radical conclusions so for example Woodrow Wilson thought that the Soviet Union was a Jewish state Catholics from Spain to Portugal Catholic priests preached that it was a Jewish state throughout the 1920s 30s it was a pretty widely held idea that the Soviet Union was Jewish and Jews were somehow connected to the Soviet Union but for Hitler this isn't this is a connection which actually enables an entire program of global action because if the Soviet Union is a Jewish state that means that the grainery of Ukraine this infinite wealth this this territory which will allow you to change to break out of all the rules of liberalism to transform the political economy to return the Germans their proper destiny and so on this particular territory is run by people who are vulnerable whose success is that they can make ideas work but who will fail in an actual struggle in other words all you to make it very simple all you have to do is fight a war against the Soviet Union all you have to do is attack the Soviet Union if you attack the Soviet Union if you kill some Jews that state will collapse then the Slavs will come back into their normal condition of dependence not upon Jews but upon Germans and you can do whatever you like with them um destroying Jews will so suffice to topple the Soviet Union as Hitler writes the state will immediately break up the Soviet Union is a house of cards says Hitler it's a giant with feet of clay what but what the connection here is that in defeating the Soviet Union German history catches up to American history and Hitler is very explicit about this he says that in destroying the Soviet Union the history of the I states will be these are Hitler's words will be replayed in the 20th century so a second huge land Empire will be created another thing Hitler says is which is very interesting is our Mississippi must be the Volga and not the Niger now in that very short sentence there are many very interesting references the first is our Mississippi the Mississippi River of course being the river that runs through the middle the United States also the river beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all the Indians expelled and Hitler of course said who remembers the Red Indians not more than once um more than once but it must be the Volga so the river which runs to the middle of Russia right so he's defining Germany's imperial claim but he says and not the Niger right so he's closing off the rest of the world a maritime Empire there's going to be no maritime Empire there's going to be a land Empire so this clarifies all the historical references and also the plan itself and then as he says a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America of course what follows for the lidat for the local population is the most terrible famine and eventually in German planning becomes very explicit that tens of millions of people are going to be starved to death and for the Jews it's very important of course that the way that the reason why you know that you can destroy the Soviet Union is that you know that it's a Jewish state and if you put the Jews in the condition where they actually have to fight where they actually have to take part into the supposedly natural struggle they'll lose immediately right so this this so an attack on the Jews is simultaneously with is is um in synonymous with an attack on the Soviet Union and both of those things are going to transform the world for you know this is how Hitler sees the world what I've been trying to stress is that the way that who sees the Jew and the way the other sees the world are connected and not just in the sort of basic sense that we all know about that he regarded the Jews as being a global threat and that that was true and he believed that the Jews had to be removed from the planet but also at another level at the global level that there was a global order that global order was defined by the Soviet Union the Americans and the British that there was a way to transform this global order but that that transformation had to begin precisely with an attack on the Jews no there's let me just close with a few of the implications of this that that may not be so obvious I mean that the first implication just to repeat and to make this obvious to make this clear the world the world is the Germans are in a particularly unfortunate place in the world but that can actually be changed the world can be transformed the the power of the Jew is is is a curse but it's also an opportunity the the second implication of this is that you have to have a war against the Soviet Union I realize you've already figured this out you have to have a worgen to Soviet Union it has to be as soon as possible it has to be as soon as possible because the Soviets are vulnerable but also because the Americans are getting or powerful year-by-year right Hitler sees something and again like you sort of prefer it had been a French poet in the 1920s who makes these points but Hitler sees in 1920s that the Americans are going to be the next superpower he's convinced of this he's convinced it's inevitable the old the best you can do is just try to keep up with them they can't possibly be stopped all you can do is establish your own frontier Empire before it's too late before as Hitler says the Americans run the world the all this stuff about the Americans by the way is in Hitler's second book from 1928 there's a bit in meine Kampf a lot of it's in the second book the second book although it exists in English and a beautiful translation very well annotated by wonderful historian is almost never read the United States I will leave you to decide why that might be so that you have to attack the Soviet Union as quickly as possible you have to starve millions of people you have to resettle millions of others and of course the attack on the Soviet Union is also an attack on the Jews another implication for this of this is that this war when you begin it again to repeat a point already made but which I hope now will be clear will be simultaneously a colonial war with all the emotional motivation which goes along with that you will be carrying out the healthy European mission of dominating inferior peoples but at the same time it will be a decolonial war because you will be liberating yourself but also the entire world from the horrible grip of the Jews so in this way of seeing the world you have both a colonial and the D colonial motivation and logic working at exactly the same time just one of the reasons why this thinking I think was so powerful in a world which was defined in the middle of the 20th century precisely by the encounter of colonial and B colonial thinking another implication of that is this the Jews are doomed by this logic either way okay they're doomed by the colonial logic because the territories which Hitler and here this is of this is very much blood lands the territory is that Hitler needs to conquer for his empire are Poland in the Western Soviet Union that is the countries that he sees are prosperous and the country Poland which is in the way so if Hitler wins that means the Jews are under is control if Hitler loses there can only be one explanation for that right the only explanation for that is that the Jews have somehow managed to make the British and the Americans fight in a war which they have no business fighting in there's no British interest in this war thinks Hitler and the Americans are very far away why on earth would they get involved it's not their time yet so if the British and the Americans do get involved that's this is going to be the fault of the Jews now the reason I stress this is this is not just something Hitler says in 1941 which he does say in 1941 in 1941 he does say that the impossible alliance of Americans British and Soviets has to be the work of the Jews because how else could these people possibly be together he does say that what I'm trying to say is that that possibility was already built into this logic and what we're talking about is a logic this colonial decolonial business is a logic it's a kind of toggle back and forth either you're destroying the Jews because you're winning a colonial war or you're destroying the Jews because you're losing a decolonial war those are the two possibilities either you're winning and it's colonial or you're losing is decolonial either way the Jews are going to be destroyed now that is important in turn because the Holocaust wasn't done according to plan there was no plan for losing unsurprisingly there were only plans for winning but the Holocaust nevertheless happened and so in order to understand how it happened we have to understand that there was this kind of logic built in now the final thing I want to leave you with is what I take to be you know the obvious problem with this argument for Hitler but also for me at this point and that is that this thinking is heavily anti political right I characterized as a kind of biological energy is emits a description of the world which is coherent but how on earth could something like this be implemented how on earth for example could you take over the German state with this kind of thinking obviously these were things which Hitler wasn't telling to the Germans at least for the most part more how could you actually conquer Europe with this kind of thinking how could you motivate one state to conquer other states with this kind of thinking which doesn't even embrace the idea of the state and in fact which denies the significance the idea of the state rather explicitly I take it that that's the the fundamental problem with this kind of argumentation and I'm just going to leave you with that thought I mean perhaps anticipating the criticism but also leave you with with with two parts of an answer the first part is the Balkan part because Hitler had one more very important global reference neglected the ones that I've mentioned the Soviets the British the Americans Africa those have all been attended to to various extents some more than others there's another interesting global reference which other had which was the Balkans when I said before like these are the kinds of things which Hitler could never say to the German public probably the positive balkan example is number one on that list you don't get far in german politics in 1933 or in 2013 by saying that the balkan nation states are a positive example for development right but that is exactly what hitler thought and it's part of his answer it's part of the answer to this problem what Hitler thought was at the balkan nation-states over the course of the nineteenth century had demonstrated that small highly motivated countries in the middle of Europe could have could by way of militarism destroy empires and change the world order which is in fact what happened in the first world war it's not such a strange alternative and what Hitler believed was Serbia in particular had shown that the only purpose of domestic politics was to create the possibility for foreign politics this is foreign policy this is the positive Serbian example in other words use you say and do whatever is necessary in domestic politics in order to be able to carry out your proper aim in foreign policy that's the first part of the answer to this question of how the state gets involved but I mentioned it chiefly because I want to make sure we all have in mind all of Hitler's global references the Americans the British Africa the Soviets and the Balkans without these things Hitler's worldview makes that doesn't make any sense that is it doesn't make any sense in a deeper way than it doesn't make sense it becomes incoherent and since you need this global picture to have Hitler's mindset I think it's an important part of what we need to have in order to understand the Holocaust thank you very much thank you very much for this very helpful and incredible lecture that you offered us and for letting us traveling to inside it this mine I would say I don't know if this is a pleasant or extremely unpleasant travel and also for letting us know more about how Hitler's so the world and and the Jews I'm going to open the floor straightaway we've got 15 minutes professor Snyder I've asked if you could ask well first of all if you can introduce yourself very briefly and ask short straightforward questions so that he can answer to as many as possible thank you yes so let me start my answer to that question with a kind of methodological observation I what I gave you today is based entirely upon the reading of a rereading of the primary sources that is I reread mine Kampf and I reread the second book and I reread the tabletalk with the generals have you read the collected speeches and correspondence to try to see how much of the thinking really was as you say coherent how much of it was how much of it remained constant over time how much of it was a kind of circular logic which kept going back and forth and what was striking to me and the reason why I feel authorized to begin this book precisely in this way with this kind of argument is that almost all of it was in fact consistent he didn't really change very much the two major changes which I think are sort of superficial have to do with America and the Soviet Union America is a positive model for for Nazi Germany at the in the crucial moments that is when Hitler is considering what the world is going to be like and what Germany is going to be in the world the Americans obviously become negative later on after 1941 when they join the war against the Germans and at that point Hitler begins the picture which is much more familiar to Americans and to others that the Americans have too much jazz you know they have too much they're the too many Jews too many blacks it's mongrelized and so on but that's obviously a kind of cheerleading you know at a very late date it's to make the Germans feel better with the Soviet Union it's very similar when the Soviet Union is not destroyed by the initial attack in June of 1941 Hitler's idea about the Soviet Union is changes he doesn't tell anybody like it's not Hitler style to say you know I said the Soviet was a Jewish state and now I've changed my mind you know that now I've changed my mind is not something one finds and Hitler but he does start to teach changes he says oh the Soviet Union is a pants law of state or it's a Russian state he changes this without sort of any notice and in stallin is no longer the puppet of the Jews this showman has raised all four hands at this point okay um the the Stalin is not just a puppet of the Jews Stalin is actually an admirable leader you know he's a beast but a beast on a grand scale but all these things come later on the idea that Russia isn't the Soviet Union sign factor russian national state and so on which then leads to you know hitler's final conclusion which is that which is consistent i mean this is the deep consistency of it when the germans lose the war to the red army that's fine because it just reveals it's the outcome of astray shal struggle between Germans and Russians and it turns out that the Russians are younger and more vital than we'd realized but this is actually a good thing because that's nature running its course and this is the thing I mean this is part of the true radicalism of Hitler he's not just an extreme German nationalist if you were an extreme German nationalist if you were like um if you were like antonescu and Romania for example things would have been very different he would have switched at a certain point he wasn't just an extreme nationalist or even an extreme anti-semite he was someone who believed that the world really did work according to struggle and if you believe that you can think the Germans are probably going to win but what really matters is the test what really matters is is is the struggle so I'm working my way slowly back to answering your question with a certain proviso and the proviso is I'm not going to I'm not undertaking here the the project of a genealogy of Hitler's thought which other people have done before me and I think probably better than then I can do a everything that Hitler says I think is a mishmash of things which other people have already said there's there's except for the parts where he writes about you know his father there's nothing in mine Kampf which is original but you can't really deny that Hitler found a way to make to connect these pieces together he found a way in particular this is the one I was stressing the Judeo Bolshevik idea the idea that the Jews are Soviets and Soviets are Jews he found a way of putting that into his larger picture of the world political economy and then his most fundamental image of the planet so that the key the key to the future of the planet you know became killing the Jews in the Soviet Union he found a way of holding it all together and in that I that I think was his achievement and and I think we have to we have to so to speak credit him for the coherence that he generated because without that coherence then none of these particular ideas these particular ideas just seem cranky and your question that hits a particular is particularly important because another thing one has to know is that there are lots of cranks in the 1920s writing about conspiracies you know a killers pamphlet are very long pamphlet mine Kampf I mean you could fill a library with similar self-absorbed narcissistic conspiratorial accounts of world history there were a lot of these things but only this one actually made a difference and part of part of why I made a difference I think is that there was a coherence in it and the other three books you didn't mention tonight what which role do you give to the Molotov von Ribbentrop pact yeah so in this book I'm trying to proceed by way of coherent capsules and what I'm trying to give you today is is is really the first chapter which connects to the later chapters by way of the problem I set up that at the end so if I'm right and here there has this planetary view how can that planetary of you possibly be realized and the answer to that is is very close to the answer to your question because what I then try to work out in the succeeding chapters 2 3 4 & 5 is first of all how this existing States in Europe dealt with Jews which is it seems like an obvious question but it's it's it's generally set up in such a way that in books about the Holocaust things are going badly in Durham in Germany and things are also going badly everywhere else and that's all you really need to know but that's not I think so helpful because I think that in Germany there is you know there is this somewhat subterranean notion that the Jews are a danger to the entire planet have to be removed from the planet which you don't really find in circles of power for example in pole which is where the largest number of the Jews live and so you have to ask yourself what does it matter that the Polish state exists and then what does it matter the Polish state is destroyed I think that's a very fundamental sort of a basic kind of our NTN or even you know who's so in question what does it matter this state exists and what does it matter that's destroyed and so what I do in the second chapter is I then pair Germany in Poland I tell the story of Hitler rising to power which I don't tell here this is all ideas in parallel with political developments in Poland so that one can see what the similarities are but one can also see what the differences are and the differences are quite significant I mean among other things the poles the poles support a State of Israel which is kind of fascinating they actually covertly support a State of Israel they fund and they arm and they train or goon to make trouble for the British in a story which has gone completely unnoticed so but in a way that's a kind of random detail because the fundamental thing is in order to understand the Holocaust I think you have to have the existence of other states besides Germany in mind and then you have to see that what's happening in Germany with the SS and the camps and so on is not just repression in Germany it's not even primarily repression in Germany it's preparation for state destruction elsewhere the people who can actually carry out the creation of racial struggle the production of racial struggle are the people who are prepared to destroy other states ie the Einsatzgruppen right so the SS and Germany is bad but everything which happens in German in the 30s is in a way only a kind of preface for what's going to happen elsewhere which brings me to the molotov-ribbentrop pact there's a lot of state destruction now which happens so the fall of Austria is very important the fall of Austria at least so dramatic acceleration in many of the policies of the final solution similarly Czechoslovakia and it's the fall of the state that really that's so interesting that what happens when Austria concedes on March 11th 1938 is extraordinary just from that one day to the next but with Poland you have a very special case which is that Poland is the first time Hitler gets to fight a war he fights a war deliberately trying to destroy the state and all the people who could support the state and he does it with an ally he does it with the Soviet Union so this creates an extraordinary situation where not only is Poland thoroughly destroyed we have two states invading it each of which is can to destroy the elites the Soviets are much better at it by the way than the Germans are but it also sets up a kind of political tension for the future because in the places that the Soviets get as a matter as a result of the molotov-ribbentrop pact the German Soviet alliance of August 1939 you then have the possibility of the Germans posing as a liberator in the Baltic States for example in eastern Poland it's weaker it only really works with the Ukrainians Germans can't invade Poland a second time and said you generally can't invade the same country twice in the second time say you're the Liberator right I'm try and think of an example yeah so that they couldn't really do it with Poland but with the Ukrainian minority in Poland they could do it and with the Latvians of Lithuania using Estonians that could certainly do it and this creates a political opportunity for them which is also an emotional opportunity because of course the nature of Soviet oppression is not the Soviets come in and they oppress you in some you know totalitarian way in this like from above they come in and they force you to vote they force you to report on your neighbors everybody gets involved and this means that when the Germans come and the Germans say the Jews were the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks were the Jews this is a tremendous opportunity for emotional relief on the part of the people who are actually occupied I mean sure some of them hated the Jews and sure some some Jews were involved in the system but the fundamental truth is that most people involved in the system were not Jewish the huge majority were not Jewish but when as I cut there's a canal Canalis a coelom which happens here there's a channeling if all the collaboration is the Jews then the mass of us who aren't Jewish and who collaborated can attack Jews and literally cleanse ourselves selfs wine and gunk literally cleanse ourselves of our own participation in the Soviet system of any blame for it I'm in a long way we can collect a lot of property before the Germans realize what's going on so this that story is one that I devote a couple of chapters to trying to tell the molotov-ribbentrop pact to make it short and abstract creates a very very unusual situation not just the destruction of a state but a double destruction where one major power destroys a state and then another major power comes in and destroys that state and it's in that dynamic that you actually have the first mass killings of Jews so we end up arguing it and this is empirically a easy easy to demonstrate the Holocaust only happens or it happens in so far as sovereignty is destroyed but the Holocaust only starts insofar as sovereignty is destroyed twice in in a short period and that's where the molotov-ribbentrop out comes into this story thank you very much Christophe Conrad I wonder if you push back a certain historiography local state of-the-art a bit further back I'm alluding to the old debate between intention lists and incremental radicalization and I think your work showed and a lot of the international research on the Holocaust wrote that this opposition was artificial and and not very helpful but in your reconstruction of Hitler's thought you are very much going back to an one man intentional causality of the Holocaust and I frankly I mean I would have loved to hear more about the sovereignty thing because there I think you have a little way out to do a different kind of structural thinking but still what you did here is very is very impressive in a even emotional sense but on the level of analytical historiography and causal historiography I think it's a it's a step back I would say yeah you this is something I think that you need for an explanation of the Holocaust and let me let me give say a word about why I think that's true if you don't start from this kind of planetary view and you start with another view of Hitler implied or explicit that he was a German politician for example you can never really understand how you can get to December of 1941 no matter what functional institutional military historical path you're following you can't really get to December of 1941 and the decision to kill all the Jews without something like this it doesn't make sense no functional argument no combination of functional arguments will get you there so I you know I hope I'm not taking a step back at least I hope the only step back I'm taking is the one that allows you to see more clearly but I this this for me is the overture to the same kind of synthesis that I created in blood lands but in a higher level because in order to see what I what I mean to do is to resolve this problem of Hitler's intentions and and and institutions not the level of German institutions because that act that fails right you can't explain the the dynamism of the Holocaust just in terms of Hitler's intentions and German institutions it only makes sense to put those German institutions and human beings who incorporate those institutions male and female beyond Germany in certain kinds of settings that that's the point where it starts to make sense and that's where the whole I mean you know my view that's where the whole intentional is functionalist thing goes wrong that it's not about germans and german institutions it's about it's about things that going on beyond germany you know most the perpetrators the holocaust are not german for example Almond percent of the jews who are killed in the holocaust are not german jews the only way you can possibly make the holocaust makes sense is to go beyond now I'm trying to make an argument the same sort here and I hope you'll find it more convincing later on having to do with statehood as such where this is the setup right this is what Hitler actually thinks about the world and the execution then as Hitler doesn't fully understand is going to depend upon the success of destroying States and if I can make that argument which I hope I can then hopefully you'll all be overcoming the problem which I'm perfectly aware of I mean this is this chapters it has to create a certain coherence and for it to be coherent I can't then you know constantly nudge in and say but as Hitler learned you know in 1940 or say oh I can't do that that comes later here I have to create the coherence because the coherence does have a certain power and then we have to imagine I mean the coherence is also a problem because anything which is going here and can't be true I mean anything was coherent can't be true coherence is only a kind of power that you use against the world because the world is plural right and then the question becomes how this coherent can coherence can be used and then I go into this into the argument that I'm that I tried to very gently set up in response professor by this question namely that the the within Germany itself this meant surprisingly little it meant much more in Austria and Czechoslovakia still more in Poland still more in the Soviet Union and they get that indigo and I can't spell out the entire argument here but just to go down to a kind of what I take to be very telling example in France the the greatest the largest victim group in France in the Holocaust were were Polish Jews not French Jews Polish Jews and the reason for that is that statehood followed them stateless statehood and state membership and statelessness followed them wherever they went so that um and they understood this which is so interesting so Polish Jews in France in 1939 when when the Soviet Union Germany invaded Poland they flocked to the Soviet embassy why because they love the Soviet Union so much no because they understood that Poland had ceased to exist and that if they wanted protection from a state they had to get it from the Soviet Union so they went if they were from eastern Poland they went to the Soviet Union and then the Soviet Union was destroyed in 1941 and they were in the same predicament before and Vichy authorities then were much more likely to send them to their deaths than anywhere else and so even though French they're obviously many more French Jews in France and there are posters in France more Polish Jews and France were killed so there's I'm trying actually to make I hope the kind of big synthesis that that that I'm hoping you're praising me for in the previous book but I'm trying to do it at a higher at a higher level and that requires me ironically to make a much grander overture about Hitler's ideas at the beginning and then you're right I have to recover from that like the whole rest of the book has to be a recovery from that the whole rest of the book has to be has to answer the question how could this outlandish coherence actually be put into practice the fact that it was though means that we have to try you know I think we have to recognize the outlandish coherence and then try to figure out how it actually could be brought into life precisely because it was to such a great extent we have four questions one question here third row and then three question and then we'll be finished yeah hello my name is VAR T Daniken coffin I'm an alumni from the Graduate Institute professor Schneider in addition to the point that you brilliantly presented to us tonight I wanted to ask you to what extent do you think if at all the Armenian Genocide had an impact on Hitler to accomplish his malicious plan if I believed that at one point Hitler even said I mean look at the Ottomans what they did to their minions and who remembers their minions today please correct me if I'm wrong and if you can comment on that thank you yeah the Ottoman Empire was very important for Hitler but but for a slightly broader reason I think in general Balkan history you I'm going to answer a question directly I just I have this bad habit of using specific questions to make general points so please indulge me in general Balkan history is much more central to the mainstream of European history than sternly acknowledged you know we have these we have paradigms of European history which our french revolution creates a republic and then everyone else succeeds or fails to create a republic the British have an industrial revolution then everyone else succeeds or fails and having an industrial revolution the Germans have a cylinder of egg and then everyone else succeeds or fails and being as old or as the Germans are but in fact I think the Balkans are much closer to the mainstream of European history where the the Serbian and the Greek efforts successful efforts to have a nation-state and the inherent weaknesses of nation statehood are much more indicative of what's going to happen in Europe later on the whole 20th century of Europe I think can be understood in terms of the Serbian and Greek model not the French model becoming the models for Germany in Italy which are national unifications which lead to national monarchies which look a lot like Greece and Serbia again I can say the kinds of things that miracle cannot say and then that model of the nation-state which causes the first world war is then imported back into the rest of Eastern Europe after the First World War American ideas of self-determination I mean not with any malicious intent but Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest are in a sense the expansion of the Baltics northwards so that Europe becomes effectively vulcanized which is sort of where we are well I don't say where we are today that makes it too simple but the reason why the Ottoman Empire is important for the history of Europe is that it's a decolonization inside Europe which shows the which shows this kind of combination of national liberation movements in the end of empire in one place in Europe and then the Germans and the Soviets are going to play this out at a higher more higher bloodier level later on so the thing which I find interesting is that in mine Kampf Hitler understands all this like Hitler understands how important the end of the Ottoman Empire was he thinks that the Ottoman Empire can fall apart in this way that's a small-scale example of what can be done to the world as a whole so the Ottomans are very important the Armenian Genocide for Hitler he might have said that I mean I wish I could I wish I could get you there were several people that meaning one person noted it down so it's quite possible that Hitler said that I think he probably did say that the context though is very interesting um it was not it was not actually about the Jews at all if he did say it the context was about the poles he said it in the context of the invasion of Poland and the invasion of Poland was also in our terms now a genocidal operation in which the idea was that you were going to go into the country wipe out the educated classes turn everyone else into a mindless group of slaves were going to be educated in a pidgin German dialect so they can't even express themselves properly and the idea was to go into Poland and turn it into a kind of colony where as a result of deliberate shooting starvation and then the reformation of the population into a kind of backward subhuman mass so when Hitler's if he did say who remembers your Armenians today it was right before the invasion of Poland in the context was something like we're going to do the poles what like what happened to the Armenians so that's that's that's the way that it works if if it works Gareth Austin could I ask you one of the old questions why did Hitler declare war on the United States but it seems more surprising than ever in view of what he said about his ideology but also it's a kind of test of the importance of hit the coherence of his thinking it was this a moment when in fact his thinking was incoherent yeah so one of the reasons that I agree with Arendt and our Thorens diagnosis of National Socialism is I believe that she's right that it was coherent and I believe that it's it's danger lay precisely in its coherence where coherence doesn't just mean a straightforward story but coherence means the ability to incorporate the dreadful ability to incorporate the stuff that happens along the way into your story so I try to suggest how it would work with the Americans the Americans are a positive example the Americans show what can be done and the Americans really should be minding their own business and this is Carl Schmitt theorizes this famously in his idea of close column where the Americans are a territorially house these are the territorially foreign power and territory foreign powers have no they have the they have the right to the monroe doctrine says Schmitt and then says Hitler I mean Hitler responding to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about Munich says you know you have the Monroe Doctrine we've got Eurasia essentially so the idea is the Americans are a kind of positive model the Americans should stay out of this you know they're going to be a world power sometime but it's not their time yet they should let us do our thing if the Americans don't see it that way it's because the Jews are too important in America that's the escape valve that's the coherence producer which is always there and that is of course exactly how they talk about Roosevelt Roosevelt is a creature of the Jews Roosevelt Jews work and this is not just something they say publicly in fact they say it much more privately than they do publicly both the public and the private are in Jeffrey her very good book about this FDR is doing what he's doing because a Jewish plot and the Jews are getting America into war now that gets me to the hard part of your question which is why declare war on the United States in December of 1941 when it seems like you don't have to and the answer is from Hitler's point of view and now I have to get into sort of the the military history of it from Hitler's point of view what was happening was two things the first was America was already at war with Germany de facto in giving and giving Britain the destroyers in exchange for bases and giving Britain lend-lease in shooting down German u-boats in the Atlantic America was already de facto in the war and the main reason America was in the war was because America was such and here's where it's consistent America was an enormous economic power and his economic power was clear behind the British and that's what really mattered and that sense the Americans already committed so declaring war on them was just you know as a kind of opportunity to be to be seen you be taking the initiative the second thing which again has to do with the military history of it is the Japanese Hitler would because Hitler thinks that the Americans are in effect already in the war right um the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor doesn't look like bad news it looks like good news because if the Japanese don't attack Pearl Harbor you're facing the scenario of the Americans invading Normandy in 1942 so to speak right when the Japanese do in the Japanese do bombed Pearl Harbor you then think okay the Japanese who have a serious Navy or and keep the Americans at bay in the Pacific for several years giving me a chance to finish my business with the Soviet Union and so you declare one the United States to show your solidarity with a fighting Japanese gambling that you're not actually going to have to fight the Americans for several years anyway that's how it works out in Hitler's mind as best as I can understand it we have time for last two questions and there are two students that I've asked can you ask your question one after the other thank you Anna birds II um I just had a question in modernity in the Holocaust zygmunt bauman argues that every ingredient of the Holocaust was normal in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization and of proper ways to pursue happiness with a perfect society and I was just wondering in your forthcoming work how will you square your more focused narrative and this is the reading of primary sources with this broader connection with modernization of Berberian dangers of bureaucracy and placing the blame on broader modern society and civilization thank you oh thank hell sorry oh my name is Benjamin a history student also my question is to well to what extent Stalin the Russian understood that the philosophy of Hitler meant that he was going eventually to invade in crania and Russia so in other words two attacks on distil logic you explained to us today was clear and transparent for the rest of the world before they did invade Russia thank you okay these are great questions and I wish I could have more um the Bauman is obviously a very important thinker for me and in blood lands I was chiefly disagreeing with him because I think it's basically on this logic of plurality that I think the idea which comes out of the front firt school and is also present in Arendt in a way that I don't like and then in Balham on who owes a lot to Arendt in to the Frankfurt School the idea that there is one modernity to me is itself totalitarian to me that's a step into the wrong camp you're already on the wrong side once you've made that move once you've accepted that there's only there's one model of modernity and somehow we're all in it in one way or another I think then you've denied something fundamental about the political and social world and from that position it's very hard to analyze what's happened so one of the things I was trying to argue in blood lands is that there that modernity itself is plural and that you can only understand what happens in Europe in the 1930s and 40s by understanding that the Europeans themselves knew it was plural Hitler knew the Soviet Union was a different model of modernity Hitler knew that Poland was a different model of modernity and Stalin knew it bear Zola on your question Stalin knew that Germany was a different model of modernity and he knew that Poland was a different model of modernity and this gets back to the molotov-ribbentrop pact question one thing which Stalin and Hitler agreed upon and they were basically right in the polls in a sense the poles of degree two is the Polish model of identity was that you have a political class of limited size was exercises certain responsibilities for both politics and culture and it's called the intelligentsia the Germans and the Soviets both thought that and unsurprisingly then one thing they had in common was when they tried to destroy Poland they both tried to kill the same people to the point where as I say in blood lands their number of cases where one brother was killed or one sister was killed by one side and the other by the other side because they were classified socially in the same way so in blood lands against bomb on I mean against my understand a bomb on I was trying to make the case that there is no modernity I find that notion of modernity to be a kind of it's a kind of it's a kind of you know it's a kind of swirl into which we're all drawn and I feel I'm afraid where do we get drawn towards the bottom now there that said there's something in this talk which is very much an agreement with bomb on and that is the idea that there's a political problem and here I'll like I'll happily contradict myself a little bit and say there's a political problem which is a characteristic modern political problem that is even though the Soviet Union in Poland and the United States and Germany are different versions of this modern modernity which I prefer to call modernization because it makes it seem like an aspiration rather than the condition I don't think it's a condition I think it's an aspiration but one thing that these various projects have in common is that the predicament that once you bring the masses into the policy into politics you have to deal with the fact that the masses want a higher standard of living I mean that and you have to you have to square that if you're if you care about democracy and liberalism with you know with the rule of law it's not actually a straightforward problem at all it seems very straightforward to us because of pesticides fertilizers and irrigation basically a little bit because of human rights and what we learned but mainly pesticides fertilizers irrigation mainly it's the Green Revolution which has created this extraordinary moment in European American history which by the way is passing which by the way is the last chapter in the book but this is one place where I do agree with bomb on that there is a kind of modern political predicament where you can't actually look at Hitler and say when he's talking about the American standard of living and killing millions for a standard of living he's not so far off from understanding actually something which is universal okay installment this is like the this is a bit like the December 41 question two clarin we're on United States what do people know when do they know it how does it affect their actions and my answer I'm afraid has to be the same way rather than denying your premise I mean I take to be your premise that Stalin actually knew but you have to sort of focus on the contingencies so I don't know how many people read mine Kampf it's a hard question to answer if you got married in Germany in 1930s you got a copy for free how many people read it on their honeymoons I cannot say and you know even the sick of heights teens - who investigated the question wasn't sure but it was you know it was printed it was it was published in very large numbers there was no secret it was the opposite of a secret but he but it didn't seem to penetrate consciousness very deeply Stalin was an exception Stalin read Mein Kampf we know Stalin Redman Kampf we know that in in Stalin's pronouncements in the same period we hear him saying Ukrainian food Caucasian oil Ukrainian food Caucasian oil Hitler is going to come for the Ukrainian for the Ukrainian territory for the cocky and he's exactly right I mean when the Germans come that is those are objectives a and B Ukrainian Ukrainian food Caucasian oil that's what it's about Stalin knows that the things that Stalin gets a little bit wrong ideologically so what helps Stalin what hurts him is that he thinks that all the capitalists are just like Hitler you know he thinks that this is the way they are and so Hitler can't surprise him right it's hard for Hitler to surprise Stalin but that's also a kind of weakness because he doesn't understand that the Germans are going to be particular going to be particularly sex successful in dealing with the French and so on because they're so ruthless and so and they are a bit different actually at least in this period so his in way his strength is his weakness like his deep belief that the fascists are coming to take art to take our stuff is cut back a little bit by his view that they're just capitalists and they're going there's gonna be a war among capitalists once the molotov-ribbentrop pact again from Stalin's point of view is a way to get the German to invade France and leave the Soviet Union alone and it works for a while on that premise and what Stalin thinks is that the then the natural contradictions of capitalism we're going to keep playing themselves out there's going to be a capitalist on capitalist war for some time and that will give us what we need to prepare so he's not counting on and not into his credit no one in the world is counting on Fran falling so quickly the French are thought to have the best army in the world etc etc no one is counting on them falling and that they did fall was it was mainly you know had to do with military tactics and other things who wants to go into but they fell very very quickly that was a surprise to everyone not just Stalin the second thing we're second problem that Stalin has is that he starts to believe what he needs to believe so he thinks the Germans are coming but he thinks they're coming into 42 or 43 he really needs to believe they're not coming in 41 he'd committed himself to that position and he got to the point where you know on June on the day before the German invasion Baria is complimenting Stalin for his wisdom in saying that you know the Germans won't Bay but not in 1941 and then I think four hours after he said that the Germans invaded as you as you probably know there are more than a hundred intelligence reports of to the effect that the Germans were going to invade the Germans Matan the Germans had three million men lined up on the inlet and a million horses not you know they horses make noise lined up on the border it's hard it was hard for people to miss that and that people didn't miss it but nevertheless Stalin was committed to the view that they're coming but they're going to come a year later so it has to do a little bit with his ideology a little bit with his foibles and also I think at the end what he believed but he but he almost had to believe this is all we have time for tonight thank you very much you

Channel: The Graduate Institute Geneva

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Keywords: history, united nations, international, international history, careers, NGOs, political science, international law, development studies, sociology, jobs, geneva, europe, switzerland, international affairs, multicultural, international relations, master, law, international economics, anthropology, PhD, development, economics, current affairs, professors, graduate institute

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Length: 98min 13sec (5893 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2013