The systematic murder of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, in which some six million people were killed; Sinti and Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other groups were also killed in great numbers. For the history of technology, the organization of the killing rested on the modern state's apparatus of statistics, registration, railway scheduling, and industrial contracting, while its earliest systematic killing programme, "Aktion T4," directed at disabled people, arose from medical and eugenic discourse, and its personnel and techniques were subsequently transferred directly to the extermination camps.
It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.
—— Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986)
History
After 1933 Nazi Germany stripped Jews of civil rights, property, and livelihood through law and administration, executed by means of the modern state's existing apparatus of registration and statistics: residence records, tax rolls, occupational registers, and church records of marriage and death were cross-referenced to determine "who is a Jew," and Hollerith punched-card tabulating equipment was used at some stages. From 1939 "Aktion T4," in the name of "life unworthy of life," systematically killed patients in psychiatric and disability institutions, some two to three hundred thousand people in all. The programme was directed by physicians, selected victims by medical assessment forms, and introduced both carbon-monoxide gas chambers and an institutionalized procedure of falsified death certificates. In the autumn of 1941 T4's core personnel and equipment were transferred to eastern Poland for the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhard—the clearest line of technical and personnel continuity in the history of the killing. In the same period the Einsatzgruppen shot approximately one and a half million people in the East. Camps such as Auschwitz combined forced labour, gas (Zyklon B, originally a fumigant insecticide for storage), and cremation installations at industrial scale, for which contractors including Topf & Söhne designed furnaces, filed patents, and competed for orders. The whole depended on railway scheduling: the Reichsbahn billed the executing agencies per head and per kilometre, handling the transports as ordinary freight business.
Connections
Causes3
- The Ideology of Efficiencyinforms · disputedOn Bauman's thesis the ideology of efficiency supplied part of the killing's organizational vocabulary; critics reply that it cannot explain the shootings in the East and dilutes the antisemitic ideology
- The Assembly Lineinforms · disputedThe assembly line is what the metaphor of industrialized killing points to, but the metaphor has limits: some one and a half million people were shot, not processed
- EugenicsinformsEugenics supplied the medical language of "life unworthy of life," and T4's personnel and gassing techniques passed to the extermination camps; but a decisive political leap lies between them
Consequences1
- Research EthicsinspiresThe judgment of the 1947 Doctors' Trial set out ten points making voluntary consent an absolute requirement of research on human subjects
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
- Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
- Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
- The Holocaust (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia)
Open questionswell attested
- The figure of about six million Jewish victims reflects the scholarly consensus range (about 5.4 million to over 6 million); figures for other groups, such as the Sinti and Roma (about 250,000–500,000), victims of T4 (about 200,000–300,000) and Soviet prisoners of war (about 3 million), are estimated separately.
- Bauman's "modernity thesis" and Arendt's "banality of evil" are both highly influential interpretations and have both been substantially revised by empirical historical research; the two are presented side by side without choosing between them.
- The metaphor of "industrialized killing" does not cover the whole process, since about 1.5 million people were shot (face-to-face killing by the Einsatzgruppen and others), which places an important limit on the "bureaucratic distance" explanation.
- The use of Hollerith tabulating machines and similar technology in population registration is documented, but causal claims of the kind "without technology X the genocide would have been impossible" lack historical support and are not adopted.
Why it matters
Two interpretations of this history's relation to "modernity" have been enormously influential, and each has significant critics. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman argued that the killing was not an interruption of civilization but a product of modernity: the division of labour left each participant facing only a document, a stretch of track, an order, so that moral responsibility was diluted along the chain, while bureaucratic rationality applied to human beings the technical attitude of problem-solving. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt described with "the banality of evil" a functionary who did not think and only wished to do his job well. Both touch something essential, and both have been substantially revised by empirical historians: from the extensive recordings Eichmann made in Argentina, Bettina Stangneth showed that he was no thoughtless clerk but a self-aware actor proud of his antisemitic convictions—the "banality" was in large part a self-presentation constructed for the court. Critics of Bauman note that bureaucratic distance cannot account for the million and a half face-to-face shootings in the East, and that reducing the killing to a general property of modernity dilutes the specific antisemitic ideological content within it. The dispute itself is part of what the history of technology must remember: to say the Holocaust was caused by technology and to say it had nothing to do with technology are equally dangerous simplifications. Technology required nothing of anyone, but it did supply scale, speed, and an operational grammar in which persons appear as items to be processed; and those who designed the furnaces, arranged the timetables, and maintained the forms were never deprived by technology of the capacity to refuse.