Let’s say it from the outset: the Nazi crimes committed between 1933 and 1945—of which the Jewish genocide is undoubtedly the one that rightly attracts the most public attention—require the minds that study them to choose between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, the magnitude of the task is so enormous that we risk missing the target each time and contributing, against our will, to minimizing its magnitude. On the other hand, remaining silent has the ultimate effect of leading to their forgetting and, possibly, their repetition in one form or another. Like others before me, I grappled with this Cornelian dilemma when writing my master’s thesis on totalitarianism in the late 2000s.
At this time of historical transition, only a few anxious minds presented the return of the climate favoring “the rise of extremes.” And most of those who risked it did so within the paradigm of a “red-brown” totalitarianism, putting back to back the crimes of the Stalinists and the Nazi horrors. This little game of equivalences is due in particular to the release of the Black Book of Communism (1997) and Gulag (2003). In both cases, the process is essentially the same: a rigorous accounting of the victims and the atrocities committed against the populations who suffered them is produced.
We can then establish a “moral equivalence” on the basis of the following reasoning: if the Nazi regime killed and tortured x million victims and the Stalinists did roughly the same thing, then both regimes are equally abject.
In a society obsessed with tools for controlling and measuring performance, the argument seems self-evident. But by sticking to the simple quantitative aspect of the thing – as Patrick Moreau does by contrasting, for example, the Nanking massacre with the final solution, in the article ” Maidanek, so that memory is not in vain »published on July 22 in The duty —, we also miss what I consider to be the essential point of what there is to remember about Nazi crimes, that is to say their radically new nature in human history.
Let’s go with an example (and a cliché): would the crimes perpetrated by the Hitlerites have been less “absolutely singular” if, instead of being the work of a highly efficient people as the Germans are reputed to be, they had taken place in one of those regions of the world where time passes at the rhythm of the Mediterranean quarter hour? In other words, would the Jewish genocide (among other atrocities) have the same historical importance if the number of deaths had been divided by four or five? If we follow the reasoning that Mr. Moreau seems to be taking, the answer should be negative. The Jews were not the only people victim of a genocide and, thus reduced, the number of victims finds other equivalents in history. (The technocratic dimension of the enterprise seems to me to be quite secondary since it is a direct consequence of its scale, and not a cause.)
Destroy for the sake of destroying
Now, even if the Soviets had liberated Maidanek as early as 1942, I believe that the Final Solution would deserve a special place in history and would pose the same problems for those who study it. It is the nature of this criminal enterprise, more than its scale, that constitutes one of the stumbling blocks for the mind: the Nazi regime is the only one to have made the extermination of “inferior races” an even more vital issue than the survival of the persecuting people.
As Soviet troops halted and then pushed back the Wehrmacht, precious resources were diverted (men, equipment, transport, etc.) to accelerate the gassings. And when the Allied forces set foot on the soil of the Reich, having judged that the Germans were not up to their “historic mission”, Hitler ordered the broadcast of “telegram 71” ordering the destruction of all infrastructure necessary for the survival of civilians. It was then that the true face of Nazism was revealed, that of a nihilistic and ultimately suicidal ideology.
Many atrocious crimes have been committed in history, but always – until then – one could attach motivations to them that allowed one to “rationalize” the exactions: the lure of gain, honor, revenge, the will to dominate, etc. However, at the heart of Nazism is the will to destroy for the sake of destroying. This is also the observation that Primo Levi arrives at in If it’s a man when he compares the Nazi regime to a black hole absorbing everything that approaches it without ever giving anything back.
The explanation for this suicidal logic may lie at the heart of Nazi ideology, namely eugenic thinking: if only the superman deserves to live, then all intermediate forms of life – and all are currently – must disappear to allow his arrival.
To extrapolate a little—and at the risk of displeasing some—we realize that the most pressing danger to humanity is not so much contemporary anti-Semitism as the eugenics that gave birth to it, which is currently enjoying a second life thanks to the transhumanist movement TESCREAL, promoted by Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk, for whom radical “human improvement” is not only desirable, but possible. When we know to what extent American eugenic and racist policies had an influence on the racial policies of Nazi Germany, we are entitled to wonder whether history, once again, is not repeating itself.