Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, writes the following in his May 1, 2011 column, A demon gone, but evil remains:
"The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The 'Final Solution' was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths."
I don't disagree, but that explanation is not enough -- it leaves Hitler's motives as mysterious and circular: he hated the Jewish people because, well, he hated the Jewish people. The scope of Hitler's and the Nazis' evil is hard to comprehend, and I know there is ultimately no conclusive explanation for it. (How can you fully explain why the gas chambers kept working even as the liberating Russian and American armies approached within sight?)
Yet, the historian Richard J. Evans, in his Third Reich trilogy, devotes many pages to showing why Hitler and the Nazis behaved as they did.There are two arguments that I think clarify Jacoby's thoughts.
One is that Hitler, like many Germans of that era, believed that Jews were indeed animated by an unswerving drive to dominate and destroy the German people. Evans shows that many Germans believed the "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy stories of Germany's Jews colluding to rob the German armies of their deserved victory in World War I, instead leading to their devastating defeat and years of chaos. Hitler saw the mass murders of Stalin and the communist Russian state as the work of the Jewish people. Totalitarianism and Jewish life were one and the same to him, and Nazi propaganda frequently referred to Russians as simply pawns of Jewish interests. Hitler mission, as he saw it, was to defend Germany from this menace, to destroy it before it destroyed Germany.
These were insane delusions, but delusions Hitler and millions of Germans believed.
Secondly, Nazi Germany's rise to power and conduct of the war was under-financed from the start, and depended on the takeover of resources, labor, and money of the conquered or massacred populations. Robbing and confiscating the businesses and money of Germany's and Europe's Jews was part of a wider policy. The German armies consumed all the resources of the Jews they captured, going so far as to retrieve the gold fillings of their victims' teeth, or melting down family silverware.
So I think it's not enough, as Jacoby implies, to say that Hitler acted out of a demonic antisemitism. It's more convincing to me to say that he acted on a paranoic delusion that Jews were actively working to destroy what he saw as the Aryan race. Jacoby's column comes close to mystifying and obscuring the tangible goals and motives that the Nazis had set out for themselves. And I think that should be corrected.
