This is Part III of my paper, originally presented as a Keynote talk at Fordham University. 

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NATIONS KILL A LOT OF PEOPLE:
Denial of the Destructiveness of Civilization: Part III

Nine-million men were killed in the First World War. In a typical battle, men were asked to get out of trenches and run toward the opposing trench—where they were gunned down by machine-gun fire and artillery shells. The same battle strategy persisted for four years in spite of its obvious futility. Men continued to be slaughtered, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month.

Historians to this day—after nearly one-hundred years of research—cannot figure out why the war—with its disastrous, futile battle strategy—continued. After four years, nothing had been accomplished—except that now nine-million men were dead. All we can say with confidence about World War I is that nations killed a lot of people.

On some level, Hitler understood that the First World War—and warfare in general—was about the slaughter of young men. In another conversation with Herman Rauschning in the mid-thirties, Hitler stated that when the time was ripe, he would be prepared for the "blood sacrifice of another young German generation." He would not hesitate to take the deaths of two or three million German soldiers on his conscience "fully aware of the heaviness of the sacrifice."

Hitler was true to the words that he had spoken, fulfilling his fantasy. He waged a war that led to the deaths of seven million Germans—civilians joining soldiers in a massive sacrificial ritual. The majority of German fatalities occurred in the final year of the war when the German military knew that the situation was hopeless. Nearly 500,000 German soldiers died per month in 1945 during  the last four months of the war—probably the most concentrated case of mass-slaughter in human history. Told that 15,000 German officers had died in a futile attempt to defend Berlin in the last month of the war, Hitler declared, "But that's what young men are for."

I hypothesize that Hitler's thinking about genocide grew out of his understanding of the logic of warfare, that is, his realization that war represents the occasion when nations sacrifice their own soldiers. Perhaps Hitler reasoned: "If society gives me the right—as commander-and-chief of a great nation—to order my soldiers to die, why do I not also have the right to order Jews—mortal enemies of the German people—to die?"

Most people distinguish between war and genocide. However destructive and wasteful war is, the military and warfare are viewed as normal or normative dimensions of human societies. We take war for granted. But genocide is considered an anomaly. People were shocked to discover that nearly six-million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. But were they shocked—are we shocked today—when we learn that over fifty-million people were killed in the Second World War?

I had been studying the Holocaust for twenty years when—in 1989—I roved across the stacks at the NYU library and began reading about the First World War. I was astonished when I learned about how young men had been asked to get out of trenches for four years and run into machine-gun fire and artillery shells. "Incomprehensible," I said to myself, the word people use to describe their reaction upon learning about the Holocaust.

However, it soon became evident that my incredulousness was not shared by historians. In spite of the magnitude of the slaughter, those who documented the war seemed calm and unperturbed when describing what had occurred. It seems that mass-murder in warfare is taken for granted. The slaughter of young men in battle does not evoke astonishment.

In creating the Final Solution, Hitler perhaps was trying to tell us something about the First World War: to depict the horrific things that occur when a nation-state takes over the bodies of human beings and asks them to become obedient unto death. Hitler could not say how awful the First World War was, even though he had experienced its horror. He—like all of us—was in a state of denial. He refused to acknowledge that Germany was killing its own soldiers.

He could not say what he knew, but Hitler produced a demonstration or enactment. He replicated the previous slaughter. The Jew in the death camps symbolized the German soldier in the First World War. The Jew in the death camp portrayed what happens when a nation-state takes over the body of a human being and asks this human being to become obedient unto death.

A sign at the entrance to Auschwitz read, "I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front to gain victory for the Third Reich, you will have to work for the welfare of a new Europe." If German soldiers had been forced to submit to the leadership and undergo a horrible, painful ordeal, Jews would be obligated to undergo an even more horrible, painful ordeal.

We return to the words written by German soldiers, dying in the Soviet Union: "We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car." "We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live." "The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being." 

The German soldier has been portrayed as an aggressive warrior. However, on the battlefields of Russia, he became a pathetic victim: starving, freezing, and dying in the snow. Jews in the death camps depicted the repressed reality of the experience of the German soldier. The death camps portray the abjection and degradation that is contained within the idea of "dying for Germany.

The Nazis glorified willingness to die for the nation and its leaders. The fate of the dead German soldier was conceived as the apotheosis of noble submission. The Holocaust portrays submission to the nation-state—dying for the country—stripped of honor and glory. Like German soldiers, Jews submitted to the nation-state and died when compelled to do so. No one, however, would characterize the Jew's death as honorable and noble.