The death of Richard Jenne is one moment in the mass killing undertaken by the Nazi government. It serves as a stark reminder of the human story behind the figures for Nazi mass murder. It is well known that over six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. In addition millions of others were systematically killed. These include people with mental and physical disabilities, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsy and Roma, Russian civilians and others. These mass killing each "possessed a racial (and racist) component". But Kay argues that central to them all was that how the Nazi regime considered these groups a barrier to Germany's ability to win the war. It is difficult or impossible, he argues, to separate "German wartime stratgy from Nazi genocidal racal policies". This approach is not universally accepted among historians of the Nazis.
Kay explains:
In view alone of this intertwinement of war and extermination, it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing togheter rather than in isolation... This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns.
In contrast to those who argue that the Holocaust must be considered separate to other mass killings, Kay argues that "taking an integrative approach to Nazi mass killing in no way contradicts the view - advocated here, too - that the Holocause was an unprecedented phenomenon."
I will not quote from any of the horrific eyewitness accounts to the murder, the description of events or the testimony of survivors. The book is perhaps one of the most difficult books I've ever read. There are relentless accounts of murder. Despite having read several books on the Holocaust and visited concentration camps and other places of Nazi killing, I don't think I've been quite so shocked and upset before. Indeed Kay explicitly warns the reader that the book is "harrowing". But reminds the reader that his "extensive use of testimony from survivors and other victims hopefully goes some small way towards giving them a voice". Bearing witness like this is of course important.
But also important is Kay's central argument that the racist policies of the Nazi regime, combined with their war aims allowed this to happen. It also built upon racist, antisemitic, eugenic and Malthusian ideas that predated Hitler. But once the regime was in power, and when the war had started, they took on an importance to the Nazis that was not anticipated. The logic of war, led to mass murder. For instance, Kay writes how the German military's systematic attempt to stop partisans in Eastern Europe was tied up with their belief in living space for Germans:
The measures taken by German forces in the context of their 'pacification' campaign constituted an attack on a substantial section of the Soviet population and, simultaneously, on the national and ethnc fabric of the state. These so called anti-partisan operations were in effect an attempt to depopulate the Soviet countryside. German forces massacred hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians, destroying thousands of homes and, indeed, entre villages in the process... The vast majority of the victims... had little or no connection to guerilla resistance, and virtually all of these deaths had a racist component.
It is worth noting that there were murders on this scale on the western front, which highlights the racial dimension to the war. Understanding all this however means comprehending Nazism as something more than antisemitism. There were "specifically Nazi motivations for mass killing", but no "monocausal explanation" for the "actions of the perpetrators" says Kay, and concludes:
The answer we seek can be found only in the interaction of tseveral factors converging in a specific historical circumstances. The conduct of the Holocaust perpetrators... cannot be unexplains in terms of their ideology alone, and yet cannot be understood without it.... The prevalence of radical ideological convictions during the years in querstion point to a shared and defining historical context.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans under Hitler, "by virtue of a certain set of circumstances and the events of the preceding decades, were particularly radicalised and mre inclined to pursue extreme solutions to perceived problems." Those solutions murdered over ten million people.
Kay's book is an important study, that opens up a way of approaching mass murder and the nature of the Nazi regime. I am not quite sure he is able to the bottom of what the specific set of circumstances that led to the Nazi regime was. While he is right to point to the historical roots of mass murder in Germany, including the prevelant racism and eugenics, I also think we need to look deeper at the way the context of the end of World War One shocked and frightened a generation of the German middle classes, and allowed Hitler to mobilise by promising to stop the Marxists. In this context Richard J Evans recent Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich is good to read alongside Kay's book because it shows how those at all levels of the Nazis' machine were drawn to fascism and Hitler and motivated to do what they did. That said, Kay's history is important both to remind us of the horrors that took place and help us understand how they were organised. Never Again.
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