The Origins of the Final Solution: Eastern Europe and the Holocaust

good evening and welcome to this public lecture as most of you probably spotted by now i'm not me cox he is a bit shorter than me and he does not speak with the norwegian accent um i'm one was that mix uh co-conspirator over analyze the ideas and unfortunately me couldn't be here to share this lecture today because he has broken his arm which will keep you out of action knowing mick for a few days we wish him a very speedy recovery now it's a great pleasure for me to introduce again professor timothy snyder this year's philip romo professor here at lse to do the final one of his four lectures for this series before i go into the subject for this evening i want to announce next year's filipino chair who has been selected and who is professor matthew conley matt conley of columbia university and quite a number of the people here will know matt's work he's worked on pandemics he's worked on the history of nuclear warfare he's worked on the global history of population control and he's worked on a number of issues in transnational regional international history at the llc he will be doing a set of lectures on the history of official secrecy so he will be looking at freedom of information issues very pertinent i think in terms of much of the public debate today in a historical perspective starting in october this year so matt connolly of columbia university is next year's promotio in that connection i also want again to thank on behalf of eliza ideas and all of ideas all of all of lse emmanuel roman who is here tonight for his generosity in funding this year emmanuel it's something that gives us great pride to be able to work with you on getting these fantastic scholars to llc to lecture and to teach students and it's a cooperation that is really very significant to us not just in terms of the financial support that you provide but also in dealing with you as someone with a profound interest in international history on a broad scale now today we are going to deal with one of the most problematic one of the darkest chapters of european and world history tim has called his final lecture here the origins of the final solution eastern europe and the holocaust and he's going to ask a number of questions about the holocaust and about its prehistory he's going to discuss how the holocaust the most murder of european use was possible in the setting and in the time where it did occur he is going to discuss how the pre-history of germany and equally importantly of eastern europe help us answer questions about these horrific crimes i think for many historians with an interest in the 20th century this is not just perhaps the most important historical problem but it's also a very difficult one to approach because historians very often approach it piecemeal they look at different aspects of the holocaust as i process what tim is going to try to do today is to look at a very significant set of connections that may help us explain a bit more about how this horror was possible and of course the opening of borders and archives has permitted a much fuller picture than what was the case before and to me first and foremost it also makes it possible for us to know the victims of the holocaust better and to know them in terms of their own backgrounds their individual significance not just at victims but as people and i think rescuing that restituting that bringing that forward is one of the great topics of all of the lectures that tim has provided us with this year and is to me what ought to drive further research on the holocaust forward so it is a great pleasure for me today to introduce again professor tim snyder this year's philip montchair in history and international affairs of tennessee ideas and his lecture the origins of the final solution eastern europe and the holocaust so since this is my very last lecture i'd like to take the opportunity and make sure that i do thank arne and mick and the the staff has been so wonderful at lse ideas zoe tika emilia i also want to thank in particular my students what i say this evening is in part a result of the discussion i've been so fortunate to have with the students in my seminar over the course of this year at the lsc and of course also emmanuel homa for supporting the humanities always a noble thing to do let me begin with one person as arna has suggested one of the survivors of the warsaw ghetto a man called mr feldshu wrote of the experience of the ghetto that people lived inside the earth now what he meant by that was something very concrete of course he meant that people lived in bunkers he meant that people lived in tunnels he meant that people were in hiding he was describing a a life in black but i'd like to i'd like to understand it also in a slightly different way i believe that mr feldchu had a certain intuition about the stakes of what was happening about the scale of what was happening about the significance of what was happening not just from a jewish point of view or from a typical point of view but from the point of view of everyone involved and indeed from the point of view of those who were perpetrating this atrocity i think that the only way to understand the holocaust or the only way to begin understanding the holocaust is to begin from this idea of the earth to begin from the largest possible scale to begin from the way that hitler in particular thought about the earth unless we understand how hitler saw the planet unless we can get inside hitler's ecological mind we won't be able to see why he thought the jews had to be removed from the planet nor will we be able to see how he was able to achieve this with such horrible success so how did hitler see the earth hitler saw the earth in a very simple very reductive way he believed that the earth was a planet planet with finite space over this finite space races were in competition for territory much like species were in competition for territory the reason territory had to be mastered was to control supplies of food so that reproduction of the race or the species was possible now one implication of this view of the earth is that it is closed it is finite not just in the sense that there's only so much earth to go around not just in the sense of the surface of the planet this finite but also that there's in the sense that there's nothing beyond the earth there's no life after death for instance um beyond that there's there's there's no metaphysics really at all hitler uses religious language rather often but when he does he changes it he transmutes it so for example he says if i were to if i were to pronounce a divine commandment it will be it would be thou shalt preserve the species so a religious form a liturgical form a biblical form but a content which in fact removes all of the substance of the bible of theology of of ethics it's important as well that hitler thinks that this state of affairs cannot be changed it cannot be changed by science this is extremely important because if science could create more food if science could alter the planet if science could improve our lives in some significant way then perhaps everything wouldn't be a struggle so he goes to extreme length to deny that science can actually solve problems in a fundamental way instead he presents science as a kind of portrait science describes life the way that it is it describes this competition among human beings among races but it can't really change it so where do the jews come in how do the jews fit into this portrait or rather from hitler's perspective how do they not fit in from hitler's point of view the jews are not really a race it's not that they are sub-humans it's not really that they're superhumans either it's that they're para-human they're not exactly human beings they can do something literally supernatural things hitler they can bring into this closed planet this planet that is closed in every sense physically and metaphysically they can bring into it new things things that do not belong what are these things that do not belong ideas in particular ideas of reciprocity in hitler's view of the world there's no room for ideas which would allow me to communicate with you or you to communicate with each other across racial lines the only natural solidarity is racial solidarity insofar as you and i believe in a social contract or a business contract insofar as we believe in communism or capitalism insofar as we believe in the rule of law or even the state in a neutral sense we are violating what hitler takes to be the norm all of these ideas um which that might seem contradictory at first glance hitler thought that bolshevism and christianity were essentially the same thing he thought that trotsky and saint paul were essentially the same person all of these ideas which might seem to contradict are for hitler fundamentally the same thing their ideas of reciprocity across racial lines their jewish inventions they have no place in the planet as it should be what follows from these ideas from hitler's point of view is something extremely harmful what follows from these ideas is that the racial struggle does not turn out the way that it should turn out because these ideas are capable of weakening races and creating solidarity where there should be none the stronger don't always survive and the survival of the strong is the only right thing the only true thing the only beautiful thing in the universe for hitler therefore introducing that is the greatest sin that can be committed the example of such a of such a traduction the example of such a tragedy from hitler's point of view is of course the outcome of the first world war there was the racial struggle which germany should not have lost but which it did what follows from this reasoning is that jews and hitler is very clear about this hit jews should be removed from the service of the planet in his early writings in the books that i'm citing in mineconf in the second book he's not clear about how this should be done but it's clear that he believes there should be some black hole some place should be found where the jews could be put where they would no longer be able to influence world affairs now that's the most fundamental level the level of the earth hitler is aware however that the earth is populated not just by races but by polities he's aware that there isn't just a surface of the planet but there are also empires who structure the politics the political economy of this planet he's aware that food is not simply something that we literally scratch from the ground like animals but that it's also a commodity his critique his way of seeing the planet applies to the empires that exist the most important empire the most important state is of course great britain great britain at the time defends what hitler sees as a fallacious notion of liberalism liberalism is not the racial struggle that should exist liberalism simply allows the british who are the only great power who can actually control food supplies to delude everyone else about the need to control food supplies the only way to challenge british power or to equal british power the only way to break free of the possibility of another blockade which for hitler is the horror of the first world war the only way to break free of this is to control enough territory that you can be antarctic antarctic meaning self-sufficient now interestingly the idea that germany should expand territorially is not really a reactionary idea it's not some kind of agrarian utopia it's not really an idea of going back to the roots or not only the reason for hitler that germany has to have more territory is precisely to preserve its industry he's perfectly aware that he was living in a globalized world he's perfectly aware that in the global division of labor german industry is what's outstanding was and is what's outstanding germany was it was to preserve that specialization while adding territory germany could have been self-sufficient in food just by taking its workers out of the factories and putting them in gardens that's not what hitler wanted he wanted he wanted germany to be a kind of modern power now food therefore means not just literal survival not just enough calories to live but it also means not just security it means more than that for hitler food also means comfort it means a notion of dignity and this is very important this also comes from the experience of the first world war when germans had to be online for food and couldn't eat what they want hitler is very explicit when he writes about food that what he has in mind is not just survival not even just security but also something like the american standard of living hitler's second book in particular is full of a version of the american dream hitler believes and he's not wrong of course by the way that thanks to radio and the mass media in general germans judge their standard of living not just by who's next door to them but by what they believe the americans have this is incredibly important because it means that standard of living is no longer absolute it's not just as your belly fold you have stocks of food it's relative relative to other people it also means that it's constantly fluid keeping up with the americans means uh not falling behind but it also means moving ahead yourself at at a pace which is no slower and this by the way is why science can never solve your food problems science can never solve your food problems because you have to have as much science and as much land as the americans you have to have both if you have the science but not the land you're going to fall behind it's in this connection that the significance of the word laban smile clearly comes through laban's realm has a double significance the familiar significance of lebensraum is is the word when applied at its planetary level lebensraum is the german word that means habitat it was brought into german to cover the the french word biotope it means habitat or what we would call ecological niche right levinson is the space that a given species needs to survive however lebenswell a word which hitler learned while he was writing mein kampf and which which he interpreted creatively also has another meaning lebensweil means do you have enough room in that in that special place in your house where you sit and you're comfortable do you have enough room in your car in general is your lifestyle comfortable leben squelm also means that and the the the politics of hitler's idea of lebensraum is that he manages to unite both of these ideas laban's realm is about the americans conquering the west and gaining their laban's realm but it's also about americans having comfortable houses it's the same thing what hitler is doing is he is conflating the struggle for life itself with the struggle for lifestyle a conflation which by the way should be familiar because we feel it in our lives too the struggle for life itself with the struggle for lifestyle he's transforming an idea about the struggle the survival of the fittest into an idea of the survival of the fattest he's bringing those two things together into one idea millions of people have to die not so that germans literally survive millions of people have to die so that germans will not fall behind the americans in their standard of living now where can this land be found how can such an empire be achieved how can laban's home and both of those senses of the word be attained um where where could such a territory be it has to be somewhere it can't be north america obviously the americans are already there it can't be across the oceans germany doesn't have a navy to speak of and the british of course dominate the sea routes it can't be in africa the germans have been forced out of africa there's there's no way back it can only be in europe or more specifically it can only be in eurasia and here hitler sees the particular opportunity in the soviet union the soviet union is the opportunity for germany to gain its labanswam for germany to solve the problem of food supply in all three senses to have enough food to have secure food and to have a higher and ever improving standard of living now why is the soviet union such an opportunity the soviet union is such an opportunity from hitler's point of view because it's not really a state the soviet union from hitler's point of view is a conspiracy of jews put over on foolish slavs it's a kind of a parasitical unity of of of jews at the top and unter mentioned below subhumans below as such it seems powerful but is also vulnerable an attack on the jews would be enough to bring it down now what this means is that the contemplated attack on the soviet union always has two sides in the simplest way it's always against the slavs and it's always against the jews since the soviet union is both but to be more precise it is always a colonial war because it's a war which is meant to dominate the slavs and it's a decolonial war because it's a war which is meant to destroy the jews and to begin the process of destroying jewish domination over the entire planet so the move east as hitler understands it combines colonial and decolonial ideas this is important in and of itself but it's also important because of the way these two ideas interact in theory and as we'll see in practice the colonial war against the slavs might might fail it might succeed the de-colonial organs the jews might fail it might succeed if the war against the slavs fails one can always switch over to the war against the jews and that is in effect what's going to happen okay now having described all of this in a way which i hope is more or less coherent and understandable we now have to face up to the basic problem this is a coherent but of course preposterous view of the world how could this coherent but preposterous view of the world actually animate politics how could it enter into structures of power such that the world itself was changed so profoundly part of this answer of course has to do with germany i can't tell the entire history here of hitler's rise to power and it's probably familiar but what i want to do is is try to recast a couple of points which i take to be very important the first is that hitler's rise to power unlike traditional coup d'etat unlike traditional revolutions um preserved what i think of as the d monopolization of violence okay that sounded had a lot of syllables and was a little bit pretentious so let me try to spell it out when you a traditional way to come to power is to question legitimacy of the state you show that the state does not monopolize violence right there are plenty of examples of that in history right now um you and by showing that the state doesn't monopolize violence you open a crack you create doubts and then you find your way in through those cracks that you've created the way that hitler rose to power involved using the ss and the essa to demonopolize violence that was normal that's all well and good what was unusual about hitler is that once he came to power in 1933 he kept those people around normally you send them off to be ambassadors or you put them in prison or you turn them against each other or whatever hitler kept the ss around and he turned them from demonopolizers of violence into what i think of as entrepreneurs of violence that is a very special group which was of the state but not of the state whose specific task was to destroy other state entities and over the course of the 1930s the policies that we're used to thinking of as mainly intra-german policies as german domestic policy i think were chiefly significant as preparations for what was going to come next that is they were chiefly important as creating potential for state destruction or examples for state destruction beyond germany so if we think of the camps for example what is a concentration camp it's a lawless zone inside germany it's a very small lawless zone beyond germany lawless zones could be created on a huge scale up if we think of of of of the police the police in germany like everywhere else are meant to enforce the laws but over the course of the 1930s the police in various ways ideologically and in personnel are penetrated by the ss so that slowly their purpose changes to the destruction of other states these are things which can only be carried out in a limited scale in germany itself but beyond germany these ideas this potential will have devastating effect the same thing is true of even of anti-semitism anti-semitism in germany in the 1930s is chiefly a potential jews are dehumanized and anti-semitism globalizes them a jew is no longer an individual human being or a german citizen a jew is part of a global jewish force a conspiracy a power jews are to be seen that way but so long as germany is not at war these ideas have limited effect very few jews are killed before 1938 and even the policies of expropriating them and forcing them to leave germany have very limited effect until when until march of 1938 until states begin to disappear from the map the destruction of states the removal of states becomes the opportunity an opportunity for experimentation and opportunity for learning from from the 11th the 12th to the 13th of march 1938 austria ceased to exist the angelus took place and the the impact for jews was extraordinary but also sudden i want to emphasize one one particular aspect of this you've probably seen or heard of or read about um the the humiliating the humiliating rituals through which jews were put that jews beginning the night of the 11th of march literally at the moment that austrians leaders gave up had to scrub the streets you've probably seen this this was humiliating but it had a symbolic significance as well they weren't just cleaning the streets on the contrary in fact they weren't really cleaning the streets as such at all they were removing electoral propaganda for a referendum on austrian independence which had been called for a few days later what was the slogan of this propaganda esterheich austria they were literally removing the word austria from the streets as other people gathered and looked on in other words the jews were not just being personally humiliated as humiliated as jews they were being associated with a previous order as everyone else the onlookers disassociated themselves from the previous order so the destruction of state not just not only makes things happen or allows things to happen by the removal of institutions it's also a process in which some people are at the center and some people look on okay now that process allowed the policies of expropriation and immigration to be carried forward beginning in march of 1938 in austria and then in czechoslovakia and then in germany itself jews began to leave not on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands but finally on the scale of hundreds of thousands this culminated in kristallnacht in november of 1938 but kristallnacht the national pogrom in germany which was very much like the pogroms in austria march of 1938 also showed a limit you could only have so much violence inside germany itself it confirmed the basic lesson that the violence at the destruction had to be beyond germany this brings us to 1939 and to poland now poland is a very interesting case if we're beginning to believe or for arguing that what matters is the state poland is a very instructive contrast with germany over the course of the 1930s i would say until march of 1938 or maybe as late as november 1938 it would be difficult to say which state was more openly anti-semitic poland or germany each of them had vast and open anti-semitic aspirations each of them spoke of the immigration of their jewish populations and by the way they had on this on the surface at least very good relations from 1934 until 1938. there was a difference though it might seem subtle but i think it's profound the polish anti-semitic aspiration for jews and this is a long story which i can't go into involved supporting jewish right-wing terrorists in the creation of a state of israel in other words polish thinking involved decolonization state creation it involved moving jews out but it also involved creating states there was nothing in poland internally that was a racial institution which was destroying the state or altering the state from within poland was a very conventional state insofar as it had an innovation it was the idea of creating states for other people like jews or at other points like ukrainians and this by the way was one of the basic misunderstandings in late 1938 and early 1939 when polish jewish polish german relations began to unravel over the course of the 1930s warsaw and berlin were in general relatively close the understanding in berlin was that poland would be if not an ally at least a benign neutral in this campaign against the soviet union and since poland lies between germany and soviet union poland's attitude is of course crucial in late 1938 early 1939 it begins to be clear that this is not going to be the case and one of the issues over which german polish relations break down is precisely the jewish question the germans are telling hitler directly is telling polish interlocutors that when we fight a war against the soviet union that will help us get rid of the jews the polls don't understand this they're puzzled by it they're flummoxed by it they see it as a contradiction because from their point of view the way to get rid of the jews which is a policy uh commitment an open policy commitment is to have cooperation among states to find some empire somewhere who's willing to take the jews or create a state that would take the jews the state of israel they cannot understand what hitler means when he says the destruction of of the soviet union will somehow allow us to get rid of the jews now the breakdown in polish german relations is extremely important for for the future of the holocaust because it means that hitler now begins to improvise over the course of the 1930s there was no plan to destroy poland remember germany thinks that poland is going to be an ally or benign neutral beginning in march april 1939 that planning starts and with a vengeance and with a kind of almost emotional aggression from hitler's side and the decision is taken not just to invade poland not just to take territory from poland but to destroy the polish state or as the german leadership likes to put it to exterminate the polish nation by which they mean not the literal physical murder of every pole but the physical destruction of the top level of the polish nation of the educated people so that poland will continue but polls will continue but only as a kind of working class or labor force for the germans so the invasion of september 1939 is not a conventional invasion followed by a conventional occupation it's an extremely ambitious campaign of state destruction obviously it's important for polish history that the polish state is destroyed the tens of thousands of educated elites are indeed shot but it's also very important for jewish history what the things that are destroyed that are important for jewish history and i'll return i'll return why are the civil code which involves property rights um the destruction of the civil code is is directly related to the ghettoization of jews it's directly related to the uh the implication of their neighbors in this process because since the jews have no rights to property everyone else can can take them also another fragment that's left over by the crypt by the destruction of the polish state is what we think of as the yudunhat under polish authority jewish communities had legal representatives um called the kehala or the gamina those people were transformed into the udenhot this is one more fragmentation it's one more institution that spins out from the destruction of the polish state and we'll see why it's important in a moment the reason why i have to say in a moment is this when paul even even when germany invades poland the holocaust doesn't start to be sure thousands of jews are killed and thousands and tens of thousands are going to starve or die of disease and ghettos over the course the next two years but from september of 1939 until early 1942 there is no holocaust in poland as such there's ghettoization um there's there's horrible treatment but there's no mass murder there's a plan to deport the jews somewhere to find that black hole where they can be put but it hasn't been found so the jews are remaining in the ghettos and and they're working there's no holocaust in other words for more than two years after the invasion of poland how does the holocaust then happen the holocaust begins with the invasion of the soviet union it begins with the invasion of the soviet union for a couple of reasons the first is the most obvious is this is what it was always all about the soviet union was supposed to be the jewish state the attack on the soviet union was for the first time also literally a large-scale murderous attack on jews as such jews especially male jews of military age were targeted among with other groups for immediate murder when the vermont and the einsatzgruppen enter into soviet territory and it's in the soviet union the supposedly jewish state which is supposed to be removed from the face of the earth in a war of destruction it's in the soviet union that the entrepreneurs of the ss have the fullest terrain for experimentation and where they invent the techniques which are going to be crucial for the holocaust because they show that the holocaust can be done you have to look at it this way hitler always wanted the jews to be removed from the planet whether they were deported or whether they were murdered was a matter of perfect indifference to him for me that is morally worse than some kind of plan from the beginning to murder everyone you can consider it for yourselves and decide for yourselves but hitler was indifferent what happened to them they were to be removed from the planet and whether they were murdered or not it turned out that murdering was the easiest thing to do in short and murdering was the easiest thing to do in part because of these techniques one of these techniques was industrial scale shooting this was developed above all by friedrich steckon who was an important figure in the at the top of the ss and police command at places like kamines podilsky and uriga he developed industrial techniques with shooting i'm not talking about gassing yet with shooting in which tens of thousands of people could be murdered in a single day um another important innovation was the recruitment of locals and the pioneer here was someone called stalker who was the head of an einsatzgruppen which went north into the baltics now the recruitment of locals is very important it's very important for the holocaust for all kinds of reasons but one of them is that without the cooperation not of a majority of the population not even of a large minority but without the cooperation of tens of thousands of local people it couldn't have been carried out now how does how does local collaboration begin when germany invades poland in 1939 germany germany's not alone germany has an ally the destruction of poland is a joint undertaking by nazi germany and the soviet union the germans enter on the 1st of september the soviets enter on the 17th of september the soviets enter eastern poland they also later in the summer of 1940 enter the baltics this is very important because what it means is that when germany invades the soviet union in 1941 what is it actually invading it's invading territories that have already been invaded once when germans come to destroy the state in these territories what are they doing they're coming to destroy a state which has already been destroyed once by people who are better at state destruction than they are when this when the germans encounter what had been eastern poland or when they encountered the baltics they're encountering places where elites have been killed and deported more efficiently than the germans were able to do and they're encountering these populations as this process is underway so when the germans enter lithuania latvia estonia june july 1941 the deportation train to the soviet union are literally underway german planes accidentally bomb a few of them so there is a moment here where the two powers touch and this moment is very important for this idea of judeo-bolshevism now the germans enter the soviet union with the judeo-bolshevik idea that is jews or bolsheviks and bolsheviks are jews in the hope that if they destroy jews and jewish power the state will collapse that as we all know does not happen however judeo-bolshevism turns out to work well as politics in a way which the germans themselves don't quite understand if you say that the jews were the bolsheviks and the bolsheviks or the jews what does that do well most obviously it stigmatizes marginalizes and targets the jews they bear the responsibility for everything terrible that the soviets have done less obviously and especially less obviously because historians of the non-jewish nations don't like to draw attention to this less obviously it liberates the vast majority of collaborators from the stigma of collaboration because of course most collaborators with soviet power were not jewish right of course the vast majority were not jewish those people when the germans come in and say the jews were the collaborators they of course say yes you're right and let me show you where some jews are this is the politics of judeo-bolshevism it's also the politics of double collaboration many and most likely the majority of people who helped the germans to kill jews in the baltics in 1941 had been wearing a soviet uniform until june of 1941. there is a politics here which locals understood and understood and understand today but which the germans did not quite understand there's a political relationship here which requires us to know that there was a prior occupation but also requires us to know that the germans always underestimated the people that they were dealing with okay so how are the jews killed i want to focus on just one early moment in the pogroms in eastern poland in in in june of 1941 the most notorious of which was at yet but there were a couple of dozen of them there was a pattern in that pattern one of the things the jews had to do before they were killed was to tear down the linen statue and then either decapitate it or throw it in a river or bury it they had to do that and then they had to sing soviet songs and then they were shot or they were burned in a barn why was it so important for them to tear down the linen statue because symbolically that meant that the jews were responsible for the soviet occupation just like in march of 1938 the jews had to be responsible for austria in june of 1941 the jews were symbolically publicly theatrically made responsible for the soviet union this of course is part of killing the jews but it's also part of the alteration of the biography of the non-jews soviet power which in fact touched almost everybody by its nature is reduced to something which just one ethnic group somehow imposed on everyone else this changes the story of everyone's lives and it's precisely that politics i think which gives it its power so the holocaust begins in the soviet union these techniques of killing the mass shooting the recruitment of locals and also importantly just as importantly probably more importantly the recruitment of non-german non-specialist germans the recruitment of the german police these things allow the holocaust to proceed what do we mean by non-specialists the einsatzgruppen were obviously specialists there were only about 3000 of these people they have to recruit locals but they also have to recruit germans the vermont and the ordinary german police are implicated in the killing almost from the very beginning at all of the large massacres including all the ones you would have heard of like babiad the german ordnance police order police play a crucial role these are just the ordinary normal uniform policemen who had been dispatched in the case of babijar they've been dispatched from bremen you know peaceful port town they were dispatched from bremen and immediately took part in the mass murder of 33 761 jews the germans themselves did not know the recruitment of locals was possible they also didn't know that recruitment of germans so to speak was possible they were preparing for it but they didn't know that it was going to work as well as it did these innovations in these discoveries by the end of 1941 showed that what we think of as the holocaust was possible by the end of 1941 something like a million jews had already been killed almost all of them shot in the territories of the occupied soviet union the western soviet union it's only then at the end of 1941 when the paul in my view when the policy is finally articulated the policy that's articulated by hitler in december of 1941 is the full elimination of the jews what's happening on the scale of the war is that hitler is no longer winning the war the germans are clearly not winning the war and what shifts is the colonial um the colonial aspiration to destroy slavs loses pride of place to the decolonial aspiration of murdering the jews now what does that mean in practice in practice what the war of course continues to go on but in practice what this means is that the policy of killing jews children women men whole communities moves westward from the soviet union into poland into poland it's carried out in a rather different way in poland what happens is that you have an assembly of fragments you have an assembly of fragments one important fragment are soviet prisoners of war the detritus the victims of the destruction of the red army in the early days of the war three million people or so three million or so uh soviet prisoners of war starved in prisoner of war camps that these are actually death camps from these camps soviet prisoners were recruited and they become the people who build and then guard the facilities at treblinka belgian sobibor where where polish jews are going to be gassed another fragment is the ghetto itself and the you didn't rot these things were not created in order to kill jews these things were created in order to prepare jewish populations for deportation but they served the purpose of deporting jews not to madagascar not to some far away place but precisely to these death facilities at treblinka sobibor belgians other fragments of the polish state perform a similar role the polish local authorities are now working for the germans and are now personally responsible for the absence of jews in their county or their village if you're the mayor you're personally responsible that is to say your life is hostage to the ab for making sure that there are no jews on your territory so what happens is that a completely or a rather different model of killing jews is applied in poland with route with with very much the same consequences the the mass murder which started in a zone of double state destruction the mass murder which started in the zone where the soviets destroyed the state and then the germans destroyed the state spreads into a zone where the germans destroyed the state and to the rest of poland interestingly it doesn't spread with the same uniformity everywhere else in here i want to try to confirm the the the significance of the destruction of the state by beginning to look at the question a slightly different way up to now we've been trying to show how the holocaust happened as a matter of chronology as a matter of accumulating causes but there's another question a related question and i think a confirming question which is how did jews survive in these conditions given that germany dominated not just eastern europe but also western europe in by 1941. why were so many jews killed in eastern europe and why did so many survive in in western europe the basic answer i think is that the events of 1931 9 to 1941 in eastern europe could not be repeated so to speak in western europe in western europe the state could not be destroyed when it wasn't already destroyed in western europe the ss could not be brought in to run things when it wasn't when that didn't happen initially the exception is the netherlands and that's the exception that proves the rule because that's where a very large number of jews do die where there is a state even if it's a nazi ally even if it's under nazi occupation where there's a state jews tend to survive not all of them but roughly half usually a bit more than half sometimes a lot more than half it and in here of course they're individual cases italy is different from hungary and bulgaria and romania is different from france but there are basic patterns sovereignty means that governments don't want to hand over their jewish policy to the germans even anti-semitic governments want to control their own policy towards jews sovereignty means you have a foreign policy foreign policy means that if you see that the tide of war is changing you might shift your policies towards jews as many of these places do france is the classical example um but but romania is the more important one romania which had its own policy of killing jews shifts quite dramatically in 1942 so and the final thing which sovereignty means and this might seem the most paradoxical is that sovereignty means bureaucracy now a few of us have a good word for bureaucracy and bureaucracy has a rather bad name in the history of the holocaust but insofar as jews were citizens and had access to bureaucracy in one form or another in a very limited form they were much more likely to survive things took a while it took a while for regime even to strip jews of citizenship and if there was a bureaucracy people as in bulgaria could intervene on their behalf the only way to get rid of bureaucracy and to get rid of citizenship and to get rid of sovereignty and to get rid of foreign policy was to destroy the state utterly this is what the germans learned in practice but they didn't know it ahead of time and for this reason the outcomes in eastern europe were so dramatically different than the outcomes in other places we can see this too at another level by looking at the rescuers the effective rescuers first of all the people who were able to rescue very large numbers of people who was able to rescue large numbers of people diplomats diplomats why were diplomats able to rescue large numbers of people because a diplomat is someone who is able to give you access to the state diplomats not most of them not many of them but several of them acted in moments in twilight moments when the state was being destroyed in such a way as to give jews access to to to state reciprocity at least long enough for them to escape some of these cases are better known like the case of of raul valenberg who as hungary was being occupied by the germans saved thousands and thousands of jews by giving them travel papers some of them are less known like the case of the chinese consul in vienna um who who saved a couple thousand jews by giving them papers in 1938 some are somewhere in the middle like the case of sugihata who saved several thousand jews again by giving them travel documents rather dubious travel documents would allow them to get out gave them access to to to state recognition and therefore allow them to survive and interestingly the people who are able to save jews in large numbers who aren't diplomats are people who are as it were pretending to be diplomats that is they are people in partisan armies underground armies who have paper mills that churn out fake passports fake documentation right and that has the exact same logic it gives jews a chance of surviving the only organization that saved jews in significant numbers was a state organization it was called jagota it was part of the polish state it sustained several thousand jews in warsaw it's an interesting project because it involved money very often raised from jews by the joint in the money belts of polish paratroopers dropped over warsaw so it was a quango it was um it was a state cooperating with a non-governmental organization interestingly enough but the state was there churches which churches rescued jews this is very uneven but there's a logic to it the general logic is not that catholics rescued or protestants didn't or vice versa not that eastern christians rescued in western christians did not or vice versa the general logic is that if a church was close to the state if it was an official church a majority church a politically strong church in general it did not help the jews if a church was marginal if it was disenfranchised weak if it was in some way in opposition or underground its members tended to help jews in other words institutions which were strongly affected by the destruction of the state do not help because they're strongly affected by the structure of the state institutions who are as it were already living in a different reality are more likely to help jews the big examples of this are andrei shiptitsky of the greek catholic church in what was southeastern poland who saved at least 100 jews including the chief rabbi the future chief rabbi of the israeli armed forces including a future foreign minister of poland another prominent example of this are um minor sects of protestants in the soviet union who who were themselves already underground and who tended to help jews relatedly partisans partisan armies are like states and they're not like states they're like states in that they have they try to monopolize force and they can save you they're unlike states i'm reducing this but not too much they're unlike states in that they're not governed by law in fact they're generally breaking the laws of war and they can kill you and so is a huge ideological debate between people who like the the soviet partisans and people who like the polish home army some people claim that the polish army army only killed jews and didn't take them in which isn't true other people claim that the the the soviet partisans couldn't have liberated anybody because they were backed by stalin which also isn't true interestingly enough in both cases it's less the ideology which which was indeed in conflict and more the partisan character that determines things in both the cases of polish partisans and soviet partisans they did save a fair number of people and they killed a fair number of people because that's the nature of being a quasi state finally and now i'm coming to a close let's let's ask about the individuals who saved jews in the most difficult of conditions individuals who were not saving jews because they were diplomats or because they were high church officials because they somehow had access to power or or authority there are not that many of these people and these people when they save jews generally could only save one or two by miracles sometimes they would save more than that these were people insofar as we have a profile of these people and i've read several thousand jewish testimonies trying to get a sense of this profile as well these are generally people who are unusually unaffected by the destruction of the state or in some cases even dignified by it people who behave better in conditions of lawless anarchy than they did in normal conditions there are such people but but they're a minority in in in some cases when you look at these individuals carefully you can see something which looks a little bit like a motivation like for example romantic love or marriage or the desire to have children but in others there's really nothing like this at all and others there are cases where you really couldn't point to anything that looks like a motivation to to to bring about extraordinary action and i want to stress that it was extraordinary because in the places where there were no institutions in the places where the state was destroyed rescuing jews was punishable by death in fact even knowing about the rescue of jews in your vicinity risked death so these are extraordinary actions brone suavas nider was saved by a woman called igneshka vlubel and she had this to say about her rescuer she writes the role of people such as agnieszka rubel was not so much that they rescued people from death but in the hearts of people who were chased like animals in the spirits of jews who were doomed to die she aroused a bit of hope that not everything good was lost that they were still a handful of human beings worthy of the name this is the kind of comments that jews make jews very rarely try to explain motivation as such interestingly rescuers if anything are more vague about why they were doing what they did they're modest to the point where one has one has the sense that they're all they must all share some feature of of character when they do describe their motivations they do it in terms that are so generic um that one begins to feel like there must be something like a banality of good at work here in other words these are people whose who the explanations of whose behavior goes beyond what we can reach with our structures with our explanations now that could be an optimistic conclusion for us because it might mean that any of us could be a rescuer but in fact i think the realistic way of understanding this is to recognize that the huge majority of us would not be the huge majority of people are are affected by the destruction of structures and indeed this is where i want to conclude whichever way we run the argument whether we run it forwards through time as i did in the beginning of this talk to try to account for the destruction the murder of jews or whether we run it the other way whether we try to account for the survival of some jews what we find is the importance of structure the very important structure the great importance of structure jews are killed in higher and higher numbers as and when and where states are destroyed they survive as and when and where states are present when rescue happens it usually has some purchase on institutions institutions that need not be perfect but institutions the argument holds in chronology it holds in causality i think it also holds an outcome let me just give you one strike what i think is a striking example of this estonia and denmark were both small scandinavian countries neither with great traditions of of anti-semitism denmark probably a little stronger than estonia over the course of the war 99 of the jews in denmark survived it's a famous story some of you probably know it 99 of the jews in estonia were killed you cannot explain that by reference to pre-war anti-semitism there simply isn't a difference and if there is it goes the wrong way easier to document in denmark than estonia you can only explain it by contrasting the very different experiences of the war which were at the opposites the extremes the occupation of denmark was done in such a ways to preserve the fundamental aspects of danish sovereignty the occupation of estonia was double the soviets destroyed the state killed the majority of the leaders or deported actually killed deported most of the leaders and then estonia was doubly occupied by germany it's that it's that case that paradigmatic case of double occupation that difference of state destruction not state destruction is what's decisive and it's an extraordinary difference right 99 percent die in one case 99 survive in the other case and there's a there's another thing which confirms this reasoning the danish jews who survive you probably know the famous story of the danish rescue which was endorsed by the germans and allowed by the germans the the danish jews who survived are all danish citizens the ones who do not have danish papers who do not have access to the danish state are all killed they're turned back from the danish border and killed every last one of them right so it's not about ethnicity it's not about society even it's about i think these political structures where does that where does that leave us and really i hope this will be this will be my my last word statelessness the destruction of states as a process and as an outcome was intentional policy there was nothing natural about it it was something that the germans intended to do and as they did it they began to further understand the possibilities it created for them in terms of destruction of jews and for everything else it wasn't a return to nature it was a kind of matrix of opportunities for for for for violence it created the appearance the simulacrum of simulacrum of racial struggle it meant jews were killed i mean germans were killing jews and others in the name of of race um it it it meant also that when the germans at the end of the war when the german high leadership on hitler at the end of the war understood that they were losing and were willing to admit that they were losing which is something else hitler and goebbels and others could define the mass murder of the jews as a kind of victory even if we lost the racial struggle against the slavs even if the slavs turned out to be a younger stronger people as hitler put it nevertheless says hitler we have lanced the boil we have we've removed the jews we've destroyed the jews we've restored the earth we've restored the planet but of course nothing of the kind actually took place the germans those who cooperated with them changed the earth but there was nothing there was no restoration involved i opened by by quoting a jewish survivor i want to close by quoting a jew who did not survive the hungarian poet vadhati he wrote this is one of his last poems very last i the root was once the flower under these dim tons my bower comes the shearing of the thread death saw wailing overhead now this poem means a couple of things this poem was found in radhik's jacket pocket he wrote it while he was on a death march he was a poet a true poet a poet to the very end he wrote poems all the way his his his last group of poems was in a little booklet where he explained in five or six languages what should be done with this when it was found on his body because he knew what was very likely going to happen to him he knew that he wasn't going to survive these death marches and the poems were in fact found as you can tell since i'm since i'm reading from them the poem means two things on the one hand radoti was writing this poem at just about the same time when hitler was saying that this was a victory radnoti's death does prove something it proves the power of ideas not to restore the earth or the planet but to change the planet his death was one of more than five million deaths which confirms the danger of certain kinds of ideas but he does and does not go into the earth he is he does and does not go into the earth we don't need to refute hitler's ideas they don't really need a refutation but if we were to point to one in a way this poem is a kind of perfect refutation that we are not just elements of nature as such that we are not just engaged in a kind of struggle that we can as in this poem define our own relationship to the earth that we have that sort of capacity that sort of agency that we can do this sort of thing even at extreme moments right or that in thinking about death and in contemplating death even when we know death is certain we can draw meaning from that fact from those limits and create within them or as is also clearly the case in this poem we can contemplate life after our own deaths what it will be like to be remembered and read after our own deaths all of these things which make us not animals not just engaged in struggle not just reducible to abstractions we are reducible by other people to abstractions we are we can be we're subject to killing by others who reduces to abstractions but even when we are killed this is in some sense not the end of that story in other words the causes of our death the causes of the murder of the jews the causes of the holocaust whether we get them right or not they're not co-extensive with the losses with the grief even if we understand it there's a limit to what understanding actually means what brings about death is not the same thing as the significance of death in other words any attempt to explain any explanation has to acknowledge certain limits which is what i'm doing now thank you that was an extraordinary lecture on a chilling topic but with a lot of understanding and explanation and therefore of humanity in it so i thank you for that we have um a bit of time for questions um and i wanted to start with one about the rescues now this is probably typical of how historians discuss things you've emphasized structural matters first and foremost and as you returned to several times in your lectures and i didn't get totally rightly the presence or the absence of the state or even as it were a kind of imaginary state but i wanted to ask you about ideas and motives in terms of rescues and you said several times that it's very very hard to find a common thread with regard to this or an overall explanation and of course i'm going to challenge you on that in in the same way as my students several of whom i hear will know that i sometimes do in class if you were to explain this in a broader sense where would you put the emphasis can you see some common threads some kind of connections in terms of motives and in terms of ideas that link these very very different groups of rescuers that you see across europe people who were willing to put their own lives on the line in order to rescue in many cases people they did not know so this answer is not going to satisfy you but i'll try to say some things that i didn't say in in the lecture for one thing as you i'm sure noticed in the lecture there's a kind of methodological um there's a kind of mythological assumption that i'm working from in the cases i mentioned and i can only mention a few i had to do so much but in the cases i mentioned i was talking about zones where the state had been destroyed so to answer your question best i think about personal motivation internal motivation you almost have to be in poland or lithuania or or or latvia or or ukraine or belarus because otherwise just from a social scientific point of view there's too much in the way um the the the french you know the the french state uh corrupt and and collaborating as it was is such a different environment than the polish lack of a state and for every educated poll who was shot two french bureaucrats were hired over the course of the war it's a very different institutional environment and so methodologically i i try to steer away from the cases where there were institutions and towards the cases where the position was the most radical i mean again to give you another contrast and and frank right um the people who rescued anne frank were not killed because there was no policy of killing rescuers in the netherlands most people who rescued the other ones were not punished in poland uh everyone who tried to rescue was subject to death not not all of them were killed most of them were but everyone was subject to death and very often the whole family would be killed sometimes the entire village would be burned down so it's such a different environment in trying to answer your question i i therefore try to go to the so so to speak the blackest places the the purest places and i essentially i i notice i noticed two things um one and i didn't talk about this and i'm glad you asked because i because i it's important one one one motivation is communism okay now and communism is interesting because it's not not not the communist state not the soviet union but believing people who took risks as communists in the 1930s in places like poland where communism was illegal where being a communist meant something did tend to be more likely to have real solidarity with others who were suffering there's there is however a structural part to this as well as um as my colleagues jeff kopstein and jason wittenberg have pointed out in places where communism um was strong jews and poles i'll just say the example of poland tended to have personal relationships because they were used to hiding with each other already before the war right so polish communists might have hidden with the jewish communists before the war and then a jew might have hit him with a pole during the war and that jew and those are all the same people um and in general you know what you find is that in in pre-war situations where jews and polls were politically in the same institutions they were more likely to help each other and where there was political polarization they were less likely to so but i don't i do think the idea of communism did lead to rescue there are there are a lot of cases not so much of communist in the soviet union where it's much more complicated but if communist in places where communism was it was illegal i think you really believed in the idea who who saw it as has created an obligation to help other people religion certainly certainly certainly you have a lot of people who explain among the catholics who rescue you have a lot of people who explain their motivations in religious terms but again there's an analogy with communism because it's not so much the institution in fact the the the institution of the church which you know in the case of the catholic church in the 20s and 30s in poland um also claimed that user bolsheviks and bolsheviks were jews and of course also at that time theologically was blaming jews for the death of christ so it wasn't the institution or what people learned in church so much as an eccentric although i think accurate reading of the new testament people who rescue catholics who rescue very often cite misquote but cite the parable the good samaritan the idea of helping of the idea of the neighbor being the person who shows mercy right that is not something they would have not gotten from church as to how they should treat jews probably not anyway but it is clearly a religious motivation but it's an outsidery marginal religious motivation and very often you see among the religious people are among the religious people who save jews it's not just as i mentioned the communities who were marginal it was also individuals people who were living off in a forest somewhere painting their own icons who would save jews people like there was someone called mikhailov who who lived alone in the forest and sat and rescued helped at least something like 36 jews and the re and his motivation you know was that he said that the virgin mary appeared and told him to do it that was his motivation now that's a religious motivation it's also heretical because you're not that's not the sort of thing which is supposed to happen um whether he was catholic or orthodox which we can't tell because he was such a heretic that we can't tell whether he was catholic or orthodox but he did but the virgin mary appeared to him and he did save jews like that those are of course statements of a different kind but um that was his motivation so there was religion but often religion from the outside and then finally if there's a sociological pattern it's of people who themselves were somehow outsiders before the war and whose sense of dignity and self was not so dependent upon what other people thought that's extremely important because the moral calculus is changed by the destruction of institutions all of a sudden everything shifts in one way and that shift is not just the germans what they say and what they do in their propaganda it's the economics of it all right if you don't steal jewish property someone else will if you're hiding the jew that means someone can report you get you killed and your children will inherit your property because they're going to get your property and all these things that is the people who denounced you're going to get your property so all these things shift the morality dramatically so it tends to be people who had some kind of in sense of individuality often what in normal circumstances would have seemed like a perversely strong sense of intimidation obstinacy um before the war you know what you know that doesn't quite get to that you can never quite get inside but those are those are the patterns that i see thanks tim go to some more questions i'll do uh two of them if i may um it's the gentleman sitting at the end over there we have the microphones so i'm gonna take to you in the same area i will get you upstairs as well please so uh first off professor thank you very much for that um however i'm gonna also try and challenge you a little bit um in the former soviet union more jews were shot by the isis group and then were murdered at places like sobabor maidonik treblinka or auschwitz so with that said um how do you reconcile that fact with uh your conception of most of killings taking place where the state was completely destroyed we have another question on the same side yep gentlemen thank you very much brilliant i've got on two allies of nazi germany italy and finland i understand that while mussolini was allied to hitler he refused to hand over jews the threat to and i post i have a person with this because the threat to the jews developed italy when it switched sides i have a jewish aunt who had to hide from the nazis in water imagination i've been in post-war career she successfully hit and finland is another ally a democracy with four of the nazis yeah that's a brother it was democracy actually fought with the nazis but i understand they said all the live finished news if you corroborate me on this do you want to hunt those two sure sure so let me start with the first question i this is in fact the the core the core of my argument in a certain way that what i've been trying to do in this project and other ones is to draw attention to the fact that the holocaust doesn't begin with the methods that look like they're more state organized when we look at auschwitz or when we look at treblinka or sobibor it can look like an example of a lot of state organization it's not in fact in fact it's very simple compared to fighting a war on the eastern front for example it's an extremely simple operation technologically and logistically but it looks like it might involve a good deal of organization most of the holocaust begins in the east by shooting as you say it's not quite true that more people were shot than were than than than were gas it's about the same light slightly more or were gassed and shot but it's about the same and and i think the shooting is more important because the shooting is how it started you know so i would in that sense i agree with the i agree with the weight of your question um what i didn't say in the talk is that is that when the holocaust spreads from the core where it begins it goes back into poland which has already been destroyed and you have this reassembly of fragments it also spreads east it goes as far as the germans go in other words it goes as far as the germans are able to destroy or pervert soviet institutions and i the the territories that you're talking about are either doubly destroyed places so the places where the soviets expanded westward in 1939 1940 eastern poland the baltic states um where you have five memories in betraying you about 1.3 1.4 million jews killed and the parts of the pre-war soviet union where the germans also move in and um and kill very high percentages actually a little bit higher well up in the 90s of the jews who are still there more jews flee because they have more time but they using collaborators who are from the pre-war soviet union not nationalists or whatever from the baltics they're they're in using pre-war soviet administrators who basically stay on the job and using pre-war soviet um denunciators by the way if that's a word the same people who are denouncing people in the terror are denouncing jews now using all of this they're able to kill people in the same numbers but this this fits my argument because what i'm concerned what i what the germans do is they they're trying to destroy the soviet state i think what you mean is the soviet union as a whole was not destroyed you're right but in so far as the germans precisely in so far as the germans are able to destroy the soviet state they kill jews that that border you know is an incredibly important border right and that's that that's how i think it proves my point on the allies yes i mean being a german ally did not mean adopting german policies towards jews especially a purely military ally like finland which was basically fighting what they call it the recovery war they were trying they're they're trying to undo the winter war they have their own motives italy did not take part in the holocaust until um this is this is again one of these exceptions that proves the rule until mussolini is is removed from power italy tries to switch sides in general when german allies try to switch sides um the jews are at risk because the germans then come in so you have the the mo the vast majority of italy's jews survive but those who are killed are killed in the german occupied zone after italy tries to switch sides and you have you have a similar story although on a much larger scale and with more hungarian involvement in hungary many hungarian jews are killed before the the germans intervened but after the germans intervene it becomes it becomes wholesale and that's precisely because hungary is trying to switch sides questions upstairs yes the young lady over there yes um that's loud okay i was just wondering um in terms of this idea of bureaucracy and state helping to save jewish lives why does a country like france hand over the majority of their jewish population while a country like denmark saves them because i'm going to forget before i take the next question also upstairs you could give the microphone to the gentleman sitting on the second row up there we have a survey going uh and i've forgotten to mention it and these are the good folks over in ideas you're trying to figure out a little bit more about those who come to attend today so please do fill in uh this form should have been in your seats you should have gotten it when you came in and give it to one of the students on your way out if you could please yes okay thank you uh have you come across or could you think of any other place or any other time where have we ever seen this connection uh as you have been describing now between the destruction of the state and mass killing could we take one more sure yep another one upstairs yes getting on the back yeah in 1944 as the eastern front collapsed you saw the rational absurdity of cattle trucks being used to deport hungarian jews to auschwitz where they were desperately needed for the eastern front it seems to me that the irrational pursuit of the final solution was it was at the expense of a rational pursuit of the eastern front wall would you care to comment some very good comments tim okay first question is about france uh the the most of the french jews survive french is much closer to denmark about 75 of the french jews survive and that in my view is precisely because the occupation of france um although there are some exceptions here and there was run more or less as a traditional military occupation where the ss had a limited role the contrast is with the netherlands where you have the exact opposite effect in the netherlands there's not a traditional military occupation instead you have the ss running things and the local police subordinate to the ss and as a result you have roughly three quarters of the dutch jews being killed and that in that sense the netherlands is more like eastern europe it's a very special case in france most most of the jews who are in france survive about three quarters and this is this is where it gets interesting do you know what the the largest group of jews killed in france was during the second world war thank you yes polish the largest group of jews killed in france were not the french jews they were the polish jews and the reason why the largest group of jews killed not because there were more polish jews than french jews of course but because the polish jews did not have state protection so the in general french authorities were very hesitant to strip french citizens of their citizenship they did some and then they stopped the process they were they they were they were much more willing to deport foreigners and the over the overlap of german policy and french policy was that the xi wanted to deport foreigners and the germans wanted to kill jews and so the people who were caught in the middle that the people in the middle of that venn diagram were foreign jews and the largest group of foreign jews were the polish jews so the whole holocaust in france actually is is a kind of extension of the holocaust in poland the main victims of the french holocaust were actually actually polish jews stateless jews people whose state had been had been destroyed uh okay next question oh yes um other cases look the whole field of genocide studies as you know i don't know where you're asking this question from but the whole field of genocide studies has only a few robust conclusions and i'm not talking about you know historians like me who you know make these qualitative arguments i'm talking about the social scientific types who look at a whole bunch of cases their one of their main conclusions is that cases of ethnic cleansing forced deportation genocide arise in moments of state collapse in civil war we know what you might think of as a pretty obvious thing but it's it's supported by the data one of the things that my argument does if it's true is that it brings the history of the holocaust into contact with what everybody who studies other cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide things namely that state breakdown civil war is is necessary for it in my argument of course state breakdown is not a side effect of something else it's a deliberate policy and in my argument as well there's also a particular hostility towards the jews as such who need to be removed from the planet that that makes them the special target for murder but it it fits with i think what the social scientists are are arguing in other words there seems to be a whole lot of cases which confirm this and then um what was the final question somebody help me rationality ah thank you thank you thank you you're a good person to help me so yes and no yes and no um there the point that i was trying to make as i'm sure you understood is that the rash the war is a war on the eastern front above all right the other wars france britain even poland are distractions they're in the way they're things that had to be done so that the real war the war for laban is on the eastern front could be pursued that's the real war in hitler's mind and also in terms of german losses in terms of total losses in terms of where the war was decided we all know these things in that war on the eastern front there are two to use your terms there are two rationalities the whole time one rationality is that we can colonize these people and more or less instantly have huge food supplies we can instantly starve i didn't go into this talk but we can instantly starve about 30 million slavs by diverting their food from russia and belarus to germany into western europe starving them is a side effect of of changing this whole you know eurasian political economy so that we will have a bounty of food then then we will be then we'll have enough food we'll be secure and also we'll be moving towards this higher standard of living for the whole future um you know hitler says what the what the americans took decades to do will accomplish in a matter of years that's that's the bait that's one rationality that rationality looks worse and worse with time but they can't admit it of course i mean hitler can't ever say the thing which i say which is that there's a shift from that goal towards the other goal which is the murder of jews the the murder of jews is a different rationality the murder of jews it says in in so far as there is the clash between races doesn't turn out the way it should that's because the jews are around they're made they're they're interfering they're making things happen the way they shouldn't happen and so if you are losing a racial struggle and if you're the master race then the jewish problem is your problem and that's the argument for getting rid of the jews and that's the argument that's not just my logic that's the argument which was made at the time so within this mental world which i tried in the first 10 minutes of talk to create there are two rationalities and they work together in a certain way so that your shift you know what you're describing using the cattle cars it's not a contradiction um because the jews are an enemy in a very real sense for for the people who are planning this now that's the yes the the no would be even at the end um that you're right of course that those cattle cars could be put to better use if we were in a different mental world but the the sad truth is that logistically the holocaust actually wasn't that demanding even from our point of view just counting the resources it didn't take that many human and material resources to carry it out sadly so even looking at it from a kind of rude arithmetical point of view it wasn't that big of a contradiction there are a few questions so we're here good to see you again yes chris hello uh professor snyder could i just ask you say a few words about uh romania um i've read quite a lot about the holocaust but i haven't read much about romania and how that fits into your theory and could you tell tell us what your next book will be what are the questions over here yes on the middle of them also welcome to london good to see you uh i just have a quick question uh this was an interesting point of double state destruction uh if soviets were very good at it then did germans ever try to learn from soviets beforehand or once they saw the result of soviet state destruction if you take a third one there's one right behind her in the gap yeah thank you just to get it back onto the title the origins of the final solution uh i think a lot the main problem that really happened during that period was the uh the fall of secular governments and i don't i don't understand why you've not talked about this subject more so secular governments and the fact that secular guns really need to look over the church and the religious organizations for europe and without that you end up with very horrific wars and situations like this and also i think hitler's goal was increasing his land was about the third reich and not directly industry thank you thank you one challenger very eager gentleman over there on that side i haven't been overlooking you sir if you could put your question very briefly and succinctly i'll try to get him to answer it uh thank you professor schneider your perception of history is certainly uh intriguing one wonders where whether where the the history will will judge you to be right or not you have skirted around the facts that germany was lost lots of territories in the 1914 1914 1919 war it was ceded to various countries vis-a-vis the uh prussia the uh assassins are and other parts which were seated to romania and other countries you have skirted around those and you said that uh germany has had claims or wanted to to to annex those countries you also said which i which i founded rather you have to be brief very so i will i will be brief you you keep on talking uh please excuse me uh for mentioning this this term which you use the anti-semitic i'm an arab i'm an iraqi uh seamite and arabs are the same so why you and our people keep on using the phrase because it's in antagonize people and it's it's a monosyllabic uh phrase i think that the point has been made thank you very much tim some challenges some questions so starting from the beginning romania romania is a very it's a very important case it's the most important case after germany it's important because um so many jews were killed under remaining authority something like 250 000 maybe a bit more so you know when you count the holocaust it's a very significant difference if you count the german if you count the jews killed by the germans it's about 5.4 to 5.7 add the 300 000 killed by the romanians and then you're getting up towards 6 million which is the canonical canonical number um in romania you had a distinct policy a distinct a distinct trajectory towards anti-semitism towards anti-semitism you had a distinct idea about land which had to do with the loss of territory to hungary and the soviet union in 1940 which made it's a complicated story but that made germany the only possible ally because only german power offered the possibility of getting the land from the soviet union back when po romania was the only country that that romania's leader on tenesco was the only person with whom hitler seemed to have consulted seriously about the final solution uh he seemed to have known more about it than other people in advance it seems like romania's policy when the second world war began was if not coordinated with germany's very similar and it's in its its overall outline um in terms of the argument that i'm making there's some striking confirmations romania kills a lot of jews but the very large majority of them are precisely from territories which the soviet union had conquered they're the ones who are vulnerable the ones who have lost state protection the ones who've been subject to the soviets and the romanians do what the germans do when they come back they say uh the jews were the collaborators and the collaborators were the jews the jews the bolsheviks of all sorts of the jews interestingly unlike the germans they know this is wrong they know it's a conscious policy to protect ethnic romanians even ethnic romanian collaborators so when the romanian state comes back it unlike the germans who are only half conscious of what they're doing they're fully conscious of the manipulation that they're carrying out in in in in in liberating romanians so to speak from the program of collaboration and this is you you can see this like hour for hours it plays out it's really interesting when the romanians come back um this is true in poland as well the first thing that people do is they try to beat the actual collaborators this happens by the way in poland as well before the germans come and teach them who you're supposed to kill people have this funny way of wanting to kill the actual collaborators right regardless of their ethnicity and the romanian forces would literally say no no you're not we're not killing the collaborators we're killing the jews the jews are collaborating the clavitas the jews so they they use the same politics of judeo-bolshevism but they seem to be more aware of what they're doing another way that romania confirms the general argument has to do with sovereignty and foreign policy for a lot of reasons um annoyance at the at the germans demands and the tone of their demands belief that the romanians had already sacrificed enough with all of the losses of german troops on romanian troops on the eastern front especially at stalingrad um belief that deporting the jews would help would help the help the uh german germans in romania in places like saxony and in places like um in places like transylvania the saxons in transylvania it would improve their relative demographic position in parts of romania um but but above all because romania was beginning to realize that germans might not be winning the war in 1942 you have a shift of policy so by fall of 1942 the german the romanians are no longer killing the jews they don't ship them where the germans want them to ship them and they actually stop killing them on their own as well so that by 1943 in 1944 antonescu was asking people you know what what happened to the jews you know what what was you know so there's a complete change is is the point okay um next question was what settler oh right so third reich i mean the third what the third reich means is that history has been totally compressed um the third reich means that you don't think of history the way that i would think of history or most of us would think of history that one thing happens after another and there's a chain of events the third reich is a way of compressing everything um there's no historical causation trotsky and and paul are the same person the third reich is is a notion about you know the kind of non-historical restoration of germany i don't understand what you mean by settlers the notion of settler colonization is extremely important because settler colonization is murderous in a way that administrative colonization is not what the germans had in mind hitler messed around with his metaphors but what he had in mind for eastern europe was a settler colonization like australia or north america where you actually drive out everyone else as opposed to administrative colonization like the british in in south asia that's an important part of the whole of the whole story um germans and soviets so they learn from each other i read a lot about this in bloodlands it's not much is the short answer they saw each other but they didn't know very much about each other and the germans misunderstood the soviets to a large extent um the germans thought a lot of things about the soviets that weren't true the one there are some places where i think there was some copying having to do with agricultural planning for example the the soviets had a five-year plan the germans had a four-year plan you know anything the soviets can do in five years surely the germans can do it for if not less um the the soviets collectivized agriculture the german and they starved people with those collective farms the germans kept the collective farms with the intention of starving people using those collective farms so that wasn't so much copying but it was that was using an instrument which the soviets had had created anti-anti-semitism anti-semitism was invented i mean there was never semitism right it's for anti to be anti the term was invented and it has a specific historical meaning of meaning opposition to to jews i think everyone knows that um the revisionism is a good question it's really interesting with territorial revisionism i mean of course you're right that hitler was concerned about um about places like donsick he was concerned about pomerania he was concerned about south tyrol but the interesting thing in hitler's writings is that he was concerned about them only in domestic politics he knew that other germans cared about revisionism traditional european style revisionism where you lose the war you lose some territory and then later you want to win a war and get that territory back traditional revanches and traditional revisionism that was very important in german into war politics everyone from right to left believed in that kind of territorial revisionism hitler thought it was balderdash hitler thought that you know he said expressly in mineconf if we get back all the territory that we lost in 1914 in 1918 1919 that will be that will be far from sufficient for us to achieve the laban's ram that we need he was not a traditional territorial revisionist he believed that germany had to have a massive land empire that stretched well into the soviet union he was annoyed at people who raised these little questions of south to roll he thought that was a distraction of course it would come back into the reich eventually but that wasn't what was important what was important was the huge drive to the east which was going to transform the world to germany's in in in germany's favor the the what was what was important was the creation of an immense german empire in which hundreds in which tens of millions of people would be starved in which the jews will be eliminated in which germany itself would achieve a kind of metaphysical balance between countryside and city which would become a great power in which the whole world would be globalized in a new way re-globalized that was what that's what this was all about it wasn't about little bits of territory about revising the first world war it was about something much grander and much more horrible tim this has been a fantastic fault lecture i'm sure we have all enjoyed it very very much indeed this is of course not a very well in any meaningful sense it's uh you will remain even after you step down this summer as felipe cheer very much part of the lse ideas family we will have you back on occasions as we do with all of the former philip commanders you have treated us to four outstanding lectures during your time in london not just in terms of the significance of the topics that you've chosen and the interpretations that you've given us but at least for me and i think for many others i've spoken to in terms of your willingness to challenge comfortable truths those that have been established and those a lot of people for reasons right or long have chosen to believe in for a very long time that's the essence to me of what good historical scholarship consists of and when you add to that the degree to which you have been able to speak directly to us both in terms of what you want to achieve as an historian but also the great deal of humanity that you put into that in terms of your concern about the people you write about you've treated us to what has really been an intellectual feast so on behalf of lsc ideas on the whole of the whole school i want to thank you very very much you

Channel: LSE

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Keywords: LSE, London School Of Economics (Organization), The Holocaust (Disaster), Eastern Europe

Id: fxyHV90ESIY

Length: 94min 37sec (5677 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 12 2014