[S]ome scholars argue that those who embraced modernity, or those who embraced the dreams of the Enlightenment set in gear the conditions that allowed the Holocaust to occur. Zygmunt Bauman (1995) believes that modernism, with its penchant for reason, perfection, progress and optimism created the very conditions necessary for the Holocaust to occur. Bauman claims that Hitler was the "offspring of the modern spirit, of that urge to assist and speed up the progress of mankind towards perfection" (p. 199). The Holocaust was a "kingdom of reason, the ultimate exercise in human power over nature" (p. 198). Recall, Hegel’s rational God willed a perfect kingdom as spirit comes to itself through the destruction of anything that gets in its way.
Bauman suggests that our era is the "age of the camps" (p. 193). Bauman declares that the camps are places where difference is wiped out, where "efficient killing, scientifically designed and administered genocide" (p. 193) occur. Technology, a product of the modern spirit, created the conditions that set the stage for the horrors of efficient killing machines. Tom Rockmore (1997) suggests that according to Steven T. Katz, "many writers fail to give sufficient weight to the role of technology in Nazism since they overemphasize the reactionary, romantic aspects of National Socialism" (p. 335).
~Marla Morris, Curriculum and the Holocaust, 2001
Like many, if not most people, I grew up with a narrative of the Shoah based on ideas such as those above. These various theories and explanations were built upon a foundation of primary and secondary sources which became, for lack of a better term, the Holocaust canon. Works like The Diary of Anne Frank, Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, and Elie Wiesel’s Night, along with the firsthand stories of the survivors and of the Allied soldiers who liberated the camps, formed the basis for our understanding. The discovery of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference as well as the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and particularly its coverage by Hannah Arendt, solidified that narrative.
The narrative which I am speaking of is one which most of us should be quite familiar with: a top-down genocide, conceived at the height of power, conducted with bureaucratic efficiency by impersonal middle managers, executed by ultra-committed Nazis such as the SS.
In this narrative, the dehumanization and dispossession of the Jewish people takes place over an extended period of time. On April 7, 1933, the law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service is passed, which prohibits Jews from holding positions in government. By May, 1935, Jews are prohibited from serving in the armed forces. That year the Nuremberg laws are passed, and intermarriage is banned and Jews are stripped of German citizenship. On November 9, 1938, the mass violence against German Jews and large scale deportations commence on Kristallnacht. The mass killings begin in September 1939, with Operation Tannenberg in Poland, where no less than 20,000 Polish citizens are killed during the reorganization of Polish Jewry into ghettos. Around the same time, grotesque medical experiments begin among the Jews held in concentration camps in Germany, most notably at Dachau.
But generally speaking, from the narrative we know, the Shoah has not yet begun in earnest. It is not until October 1940 that the Warsaw ghetto is established; the model ghetto at Theresienstadt for the elite of German Jewry does not open until 1941. In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s freedoms are restricted but her parents are able to purchase her famous diary in June 1942 and do not go into hiding until July of that year. At the same time, Oskar Schindler is happily running the Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik in Krakow using around 1,000 Jews as forced labor. Schindler will not witness the raid on the Krakow ghetto and experience his conversion until 1943. Shortly before the raid Schindler witnesses in Krakow, the Warsaw ghetto uprising begins. The destruction of the Warsaw ghetto on May 16, 1943, is remembered by most as when the ghettoization of Jews by the Nazis ends and the exterminations begin.
But this narrative obscures the truth. By the time of the Wannsee Conference and the formulation of the "Final Solution", over one million Jews have been killed. By the time Anne Frank writes the first entry in her diary over half the victims of the Shoah are already dead. By the start of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, one third of the Jews in the world are gone.
And for a long time, they remained that way: lost. Few records and accounts existed of who they were, what had happened to them, where and how they had died, or who ordered them killed. And so they were invisible, to history, to our shared culture, and from our understanding of what the Shoah was. And then, in 2004, a Catholic priest changed all of that.
Father Patrick Desbois was fascinated by the Nazi prison camps of the Ukraine from a young age. His grandfather had been a French soldier during the war, and had been deported to the Rava-Ruska prison camp in Western Ukraine during the war, although he rarely spoke of it. This interest continued long after he was ordained by the Catholic Church, and he studied the Shoah at Yad V’Shem in Israel and Jewish theology in France, and served as Secretary of the Episcopal Committee of French Bishops for Relations with Judaism. In 2002, he decided to travel to the Ukraine, to see where his grandfather was imprisoned, and to pay his respects at a memorial to the dead. At Rava-Ruska, Father Desbois asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor told him that he didn’t know.
"I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know," Father Desbois recalled.
The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.
From 2004 to 2008, Desbois identified over 600 mass graves of Jews in the Ukraine. He has collected over 700 videotaped interviews with the witnesses of their deaths. He has restored the narrative of 1.5 million Jewish victims of the Shoah whose stories were lost to history, a quarter of the list of the dead. And he will also uncover facts that will alter our narrative, and our understanding of the Shoah.
At the beginning of 1940, fewer than 100,000 Jews have been killed by the Nazis. At the moment, the Nazis are contemplating the Madagascar Plan (the expulsion of Jews from Europe and relocation to Madagascar). But the plan is rendered moot by the Battle of Britain, and the search for the "Final Solution" commences in earnest. During the period between the abandonment of the Madagascar Plan and the Wannsee Conference, the Nisko Plan is implemented, and the Jews of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Bohemia and Moravia are shipped by rail to the Generalgouvernement area of Poland. They remain there as part of the Burggraben Project, the plan to use Jews as forced labor for the Wehrmacht, until it is abandoned in late 1940.
Meanwhile, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich forms the Einsatzgruppen (task forces) in 1939, a paramilitary organization (outside of the formal military), drawing from the ranks of the Ordnungspolizei, the Waffen-SS, and various militia groups, with an officer corps from the Gestapo, Kripo, and SD. Their original mission was to trail behind the Wehrmacht to secure important government buildings, offices, and papers, which they did in the invasions of the Sudetenland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. However, the mission of the Einsatzgruppen expanded for the invasion of Poland; Hitler gave specific orders that, "Whatever we find in the shape of an upper class in Poland will be liquidated."
The success of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland leads to the expansion of their role in the plans for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. In addition to the task of assassinating the aristocracy, Heydrich drafted orders on July 2, 1941 instructed the Eisatzgruppen officers, "No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Bolshevik or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged." And the roughly three thousand members of the Einsatzgruppen were receptive to that encouragement, and over the next six months, murdered over 1.5 million Jews with the assistance of local collaborators. Over one hundred thousand more were killed by the Wehrmacht with the Eisatzgruppen assisting.
This blitzkrieg of murder is what Father Desbois has documented, what he calls the "Holocaust by Bullets". These victims of the Shoah did not die in train cars or gas chambers, as part of an industrial process. They were rounded up and shot, one at a time, while their neighbors watched. Ammunition ran short, and Father Desbois has told the story of how only one shot per Jew could be permitted, and as a result the living were often buried in pits with the dead. One witness told of how the pit moved for three days with the breath of the living underneath. No one saved them.
Over 25% of the Jews killed in the Shoah died in the "Holocaust by Bullets". There was no slow progression of laws restricting the role the Jews could have in society. They were not forced into ghettoes or shipped away in trains. There was no state propaganda effort of books and films and radio shows which spent years blaming the ills of society on the Jews. There was no care taken to deceive the Jews about what was going to happen to them, no "Arbeit Macht Frei" lie about their fate, no false showers into which they were lured. And there was no care taken to deceive the communities from which they were taken. There were no career soldiers just following orders given to them by officers. And over the span of a baseball season, they killed 90% of the Jews in the Baltics, 65% of the Jews in Belarus, 60% of the Jews in the Ukraine. One at a time.
Meanwhile, after the collapse of the Burggraben Project, the Jews of Austria, Slovakia, and Bohemia and Moravia were shoved into camps in the south of Poland. The Nazi high command wishes to ship more Jews to that region, but the Generalgouvernement administration refuses, as they already have over a million Jews without any work for them to perform. Then, as the Holocaust by Bullets is half complete, on October 13, 1941, four months before the articulation of the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference, SS Leader Odilo Globocnik receives a verbal order from Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to launch Operation Reinhard, beginning with the immediate construction of the extermination camp at Belzec, which will be followed by the construction of the extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Maidanek. Unlike at Dachau or Auschwitz, there were no electrified fences at Belzec. There were no false showers there either. There was no pretense on the part of anyone involved that something other than death was the business of those camps.
Over the next fourteen months, Operation Reinhard will result in the deaths of approximately two million Jews, one third of the total killed in the Shoah. Despite having begun before the Final Solution was articulated at Wannsee, Operation Reinhard will also turn out to be the most successful in eliminating Jewish populations entirely; 90% of Austrian Jews will be eliminated, 89% of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 83% of Slovakian Jewry. Over one million Polish Jews will die there as well. Operation Reinhard will be over, its camps closed, over a year before the arrest of Anne Frank.
Why, then, is the majority of the Shoah obscured in our memory? Why is it that only in the last few years has the testimony of the witnesses who remain been gathered?
A large part of it has to do with the fact that the majority of the key witnesses did not survive the war. Many of these witnesses were the survivors themselves; roughly 20,000 prisoners of Auschwitz survived that ordeal. From Belzec, the grave of half a million Jews, only two survivors remained - Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman. Only forty survivors lived to tell the tale of Treblinka. Some 50 to 70 survived Sobibor. The engineer of the greatest massacres of Jews in the Shoah, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, who commanded the Einsatzgruppen and for whom Operation Reinhard was named, was assassinated mere months after he chaired the Wannsee Conference. He would not be present to give testimony at Nuremberg or survive to be tried in Israel like Eichmann.
The Soviet Union further complicated matters. Nearly one third of the Jews killed during the Shoah were Soviet citizens. But while Soviet witnesses, such as Vassily Grossman, documented the Nazi atrocities against Jews, any mention of the particularly Jewish nature of the victims was suppressed by Stalin. The official Soviet death toll of World War II counted Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as Russians, and under legislation currently proposed by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, claiming that the one million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Ukranians and Belarusians were killed for any reason other than because they were Russian will be a criminal offense.
Yet the partial history which has been brought to light, by Father Desbois and others, reshapes our understanding of what occurred in the Shoah, and our understanding of genocide in general. Noted writers on the subject of the Rwandan genocide, for example Jean Hatzfeld and Philip Gourevitch, have made central to our narrative of that atrocity that the 800,000 Tutsis killed in twelve weeks was the most rapid and complete genocide of the modern era. What we know now is that this was exactly the pace of the slaughter conducted by the Einsatzgruppen. Many others, building off of the scholarship of the Shoah quoted at the beginning of this essay, have stated that one of the most shocking aspects of the Rwandan genocide is that unlike that of the Nazis, it was low-tech and decentralized. Yet, as it turns out, the most murderous aspects of the Shoah share that characteristic.
We can only work with the facts that we know; we are captured by the narratives of which we are aware. What the revelations of the Shoah by bullets demonstrate to us is the danger of false priors. We are given incomplete data, and reach erroneous conclusions. Repetitions of history become more difficult to recognize, and future threats are exaggerated or diminished in significance to us because of it.
But in many cases, such as this one, the truth remains, waiting to be discovered. If we are willing to take that journey.