When first the idea
different has taken deep roots,
all the incomprehensible becomes possible.
Slavenka Drakulic, Balkan Express, 1992
This is the history of the complicated process that led to a genocide.
It is about human beings, because it is human beings that kill other human beings - or let them get killed. And it is human beings who shall prevent that murder and genocide happen at all.
The book describes those factors and mental structures that aroused a particular genocide: The annihilation of European Jewry during World War II. Its topic is therefore very concrete, but its scope is universal, because many of the phenomena it uncovers unfortunately are not specific for the process that led to the Holocaust.
Human beings act out of their images of others, and other genocides in our century demonstrate with unconforting distictness how it is possible for cynical men with power to create enemy pictures that enable human beings to believe that they are doing something good to society while killing other human beings - just because the victims are claimed to be different.
It was Adolf Hitler who decided to kill all European Jews, but he never did it himself. He left it to others who again left it to others to do the killing. The crimes were legitimized through the religion that was created based on the Fuehrer Myth.
The Fuehrer was a psychopat, but he nevertheless succeeded with the help of others to stage the world in a way that made reality match his own world view. A decisive premise for that this could happen was the deep anchoring of anti-Semitism in European cultural thinking; an equally important premise was the trauma of the lost World War I he had in common with the rest of the German society.
A third central premise war the character of Adolf Hitler's individual trauma that made him believe that Foresight had chosen him to create a new society on the ruins of the one that had fallen apart with the fall of the Kaiserreich; a fourth premise was his personal ability to fascinate others with his message that finally made the whole German population believe it - or at least accept it.
The book elucidate the way how Adolf Hitler succeeded in transfering his own inner images to inner images inside others. It underlines the significance of cultural norms and communication in a society as well as it elucidates that production of symbols and reality, communication between human beings allways has been an expression of.
The relation to the surrounding world of each individual is created out of the person's perception of it and life itself which is constituted through his or hers earlier experiences - and each human being seeks currently to obtain a confirmation of this perception.
This was also the case of Adolf Hitler who built his world view upon strongly emotional - in particular visual connotated - experiences of the surrounding society. His narcissism was the origin of a dreamworld whose structures and ideals derived from the world of visual art, opera and film - a dream world that enabled him to repress the realities of others' reality. The Fuehrer of the Third Reich looked upon himself as an artist like his ideals Richard Wagner and Franz von Stuck and he took over their ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk.
It was Adolf Hitler's traumatic experience in Pasewalk on November, 10, 1918, that framed these elements together to that unity he put into words in his private bible, Mein Kampf. This book was the script for that Gesamtkunstwerk, he tried to create through the rest of his life. It was a myth, but with his own eyes the Fuehrer could all the time live through, how it was more and more confirmed by the outer world of reality.
The book describes a process where the person Adolf Hitler slowly, but clearly disappears and is replaced with that Fuehrer Myth that was created in the consciousness of those who followed him. And it analyses in particular how Hitler's myth got two activly acting hands in Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler.
It were these two men who together with Reinhard Heydrich created that Nazi mixture of fascination and terror which aroused the murder on millions of human beings. The Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels produced the film Der ewige Jude which convinced Adolf Hitler that he had to take a decision - and the Fuehrer transfered the responsability for the task to Heinrich Himmler.
Holocaust has become a trauma to our civilization and it is neccessary to confront oneself with this trauma. In order to be able to do so - and as part of the attempt to prevent that it could happen again - it is however absolutely neccessary to make a precise reconstruction of the process that led to the trauma.
This reconstruction focuses on two very particular dates as the decisive moments in this decision-making proces:
June 1, 1940, as the date of Hitler's own, definitive decision of physical
annihilation of European Jewry
and
June 22, 1940, as the date of Hitler's oral order to Heinrich Himmler.
Through this notion the book differs fundamentally from most other studies and accounts of the Holocaust. Based on a comprehensive written sourcematerial historians mostly point to 1941 as the decisive year, although they all underline the many problems there are in interpreting the material that is handed down to to-day - partly because many orders only were given orally and never put in writing. Another problem is the way written documents deliberately were blurred which makes it difficult to reach an interpretation beyond any doubts.
The main argument to put forward another chronology with the summer 1940 as the point of no return is the film Der ewige Jude which was constructed and finally approved through an intimate cooperation between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. The film and its whole production story can best be characterized as an X-ray of the decision-making process.
The juxta-positioning in Der ewige Jude of ritual Jewish slaughtering and Hitlers notorius prophecy from 1939 that a new war would mean the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe can only be perceived as a deliberate call for - and legitimation of - Holocaust. Therefore the film must be seen as the very promulgation of the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were strongly emotionally influenced by film. Therefore they were both very much aware of the significance of this mass-medium - as well as of others - in a modern mass society and used them deliberately as political instruments in the Third Reich.
The written sources from the production of Der ewige Jude prove synonymously that it was no different on this crucial topic in their common world view. On the contrary. And the - at the same time - both emotional and cynical way how they produced their private image of the enemy in the "reality-close" film-medium correspond ucanningly precise to the way the genocide in the former Yugoslavia was staged through television and video.
Therefore the incomprehensable can happen again.