ANALYSIS OF
"THE HOLOCAUST AND PHILOSOPHY"
by Adam Watson
(2002)

Fackenheim, Emil L. "The Holocaust and Philosophy." The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 82, Issue 10, Eighty-Second Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Oct. 1985), 505-514.

We live in a world where a phrase such as "ethnic cleansing" does not surprise us. It is not that we have lost the ability to judge what is inhumane; we still denounce large and small-scale atrocities, shaking our head while reading in-depth magazine articles or while watching network newscast special reports. The problem is what was once rare has become commonplace and numbers now only numb. Two Jews are murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Two thousand Americans are killed by terrorists with hijacked airplanes. Two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims are "cleansed."

We also live in a world where we are constantly attempting to contextualize our lives in real-time with the past, to gain instant perspective on complex issues. One such issue is the fate of Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. When the totality of Slobodan Milosevic's crimes were finally revealed, there were inevitable comparisons of Milosevic to Hitler, of the former's ethnic cleansing to the latter's Final Solution. Yet some historians bristled at calling the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia a "holocaust." It was not just a matter of semantics, or of capitalization. Rather, critics were concerned that a comparison would diminish the Holocaust. The uniqueness of what happened to six million Jews sixty years ago is in danger of being forgotten. What makes the Holocaust such a turning point in humanity's history? Emil L. Fackenheim's article "The Holocaust and Philosophy" attempts to answer that question and put the Holocaust in philosophical perspective.

"Philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust," Fackenheim begins. "Why?" (505) He answers with three main reasons: first, philosophers like to speak of universals, not about something as specific and unique as the Holocaust; second, philosophers rarely discuss Jewish topics; third, the Holocaust itself is so overwhelmingly a negative event that it defies attempts to understand it (505-506). Fackenheim first addresses the uniqueness of the Final Solution. Genocides had occurred before in wartime. Fackenheim compares Nazi Germany's Weltanschauung to Istanbul's killing of Armenians in World War I. Both involved secret killing of specific victims under the auspices of wartime defensive measures, and faced little world protest. Yet it was the finality of Germany's solution to "the Jewish problem" that made it unique; it was an "intended, planned, and largely successful extermination" (506, author's italics). In addition, the means to achieve the Final Solution were without precedent. "[A] scholastically precise definition of the victims" was used, and success would not have been possible without the willing complicity of countless "direct and indirect accomplices: clerks, newspaperman, lawyers, bank managers, doctors, soldiers, railwaymen, entrepreneurs" (506).

To explain why the Holocaust happened, Fackenheim digs deeper. "In the Nazi Weltanschauung Jews were vermin," he writes, "and one does not execute vermin, murder it, spare its young or its old: one exterminates vermin - coldly, systematically, without feeling" (507-508, author's italics). When Hitler talks of the Jewish virus, he does not mean it metaphorically; he means it as the literal truth. A new principle was created: "[F]or one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death" (509, author's italics). A new "planet" was created, "not of this world," yet paradoxically it "took place in our world" (509, author's italics).

Philosophers and historians are left to explain how it took place. To blame it simply on Nazi insanity is too pat of an answer. What made Auschwitz possible when such an atrocity was previously impossible required a redefinition of "human." "To die one's own death has always been a freedom subject to loss by accident," Fackenheim writes, but "[o]n Planet Auschwitz . . . the loss of [this freedom] was made essential, and its survival accidental" (511). Nazism did not achieve a horrible victory by its physical incarceration of the Jews. Its success was the ability to make existence itself an absurdity against the odds. Fackenheim then turns to the Nazis themselves. The old definitions of evil as ignorance, weakness, or "diabolical grandeur" do not seem to apply here (512). Using Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as a case in point, he assesses the evil of the Nazis as "banal" (512). Hitler is the most banal Nazi of them all: "His ideas . . . are trite. . . . Other than a low cunning, his one distinguishing mark is a devouring passion . . . to show them -- whom? -- that the nobody is a somebody" (512-513). "[T]he whole Nazi Reich, and hence Planet Auschwitz, would doubtless have disintegrated," Fackenheim writes, if someone had assassinated "just this one individual" (512). Yet we still cannot allow Eichmann and countless others to get away with a defense of being "a mere 'cog in the wheel'": "[T]he mesmerized and manipulated allowed themselves to be so treated, and the dominated and terrorized gave in to craven cowardice. . . . The operators of the Auschwitz system were all its unbanal creators even as they were its banal creatures" (513, author's italics). Only such a system, "a whole that was more than the sum of its parts," can explain the existence of the Holocaust (513).

I admire Fackenheim's attempt to determine universal truths inside the complexities of such a horrible event as the Holocaust. Sociologically, he argues soundly that systems are not simple culminations of their particular building blocks, but instead are new synergistic creations. Fackenheim shows that Nazi attitudes and a redefinition of Jews as inhuman fuse in a unprecedented way, forming a genocide never repeated with such brutality, bureaucracy, selectivity, and high number of victims. Murdering human beings on a grand scale can be difficult. To exterminate (not murder) something - barely a multi-celled organism, just a virus! - is much easier. Combine this with centuries-old German anti-semitism and a belief that "extermination" is as inconsequential as shuffling paperwork or pulling a switch, and the Holocaust is born.

However, I disagree with Fackenheim's analysis of Hitler. In applying his own logic, the Nazi whole is greater than the sum of its parts - even a part as significant as Hitler. Therefore, we risk as much by overestimating Hitler's influence as we do by underestimating it. Fackenheim's argument fails by using two extreme positions that point completely away from each other, instead of using these same points to point inward at a more median (if less precise) truth. First, his assessment of Hitler as "trite" and "banal" does not seem entirely accurate. Hitler was perhaps not intellectually brilliant, but he was hardly a colorless functionary such as Eichmann. Regardless of how murderously wrong Hitler's outlook and actions were, his charisma and conviction (particularly in public speaking) undoubtably were signs of some kind of genius, albeit a sinister one. Hitler's image became the godhead that the Eichmanns of Germany worshiped; it was an evil godhead, but never "trite." Indeed, if Hitler was so inconsequential, why would assassinating him make a difference, as Fackenheim suggests? There were thousands of Eichmanns in the Reich, but few Hitlers.

This leads to my second point of dissent. An assassination of Hitler himself would not have automatically stopped the Holocaust from occurring, if only because the figure of Hitler was such a powerful symbol. The problem is one of timing, unaddressed by Fackenheim. When would have been the perfect time to kill him? 1933, before his chancellorship? 1939, before the invasion of Poland? 1942, before the Wannsee Conference? At any of these points, a murdered Hitler might have become a more powerful symbol than Hitler ever was as an actual Fuhrer. Imagine the Nazi propaganda making Hitler a victim of "the Jewish conspiracy," a martyr in a Himmler or Goering-led Reich and a rallying point for anti-semitic Germans. The only attempted assassination would occur (or more accurately, could occur) in July of 1944, when Germany was losing the war. It was fear of defeat that spurred these anti-Hitler conspirators, not outrage against the murder of Jews. Even when the war was considered lost, official commands that would spare Jewish lives were ignored. When Himmler ordered death camps to stop extermination in the fall of 1944, many (such as Eichmann) defied him.

In properly determining Hitler's place in the greater Nazi system, Fackenheim creates a paradox. He cannot have a system greater than its parts and a part greater than its system; he cannot have a man both "trite" to the point of insignificance and essential to the point that his assassination eliminates an institution of nationalized killing. Hitler elusively remains between these two extreme poles. There is no doubt that a Nazi Germany without Hitler's decade of leadership would have taken a different historical course, and it is possible that less Jews would have been killed. But "less" might have meant three million dead instead of six million; a significant reduction of murders, to be sure, but still a Holocaust. It is also conceivable a martyred Hitler could have fueled a Germanic vengeance that would have killed millions more.

Of course, the horror of the Holocaust is not determined only by sheer numbers. If half as many Jews died, or twice as many perished, the event would not be any more or less tragic, or unique. As Fackenheim shows in his essay, what makes the Holocaust pivotal and important is the ruthless and successful fortitude of one group of people to make another group of people non-human. Philosophically, the question to ask is not whether the Eichmanns of Nazi Germany were mere cogs in a wheel, but how a wheel could exist that would allow such cogs.

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