Why?: Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Defective Gene Pool

Peter Hayes is very aware of the problem of ‘explaining’ the Holocaust. Right up front he points out the basic paradox:

“To say that one can explain the occurrence of the Holocaust seems tantamount to normalizing it, but professing that one cannot grasp it is an assertion of the speaker’s innocence—of his or her incapacity not only to conceive of such horror but to enact anything like it.”

In other words, to explain the murder of 6 million people requires finding a rational motive which then mitigates the massive evil involved. But to consider the event as a mute fact implies that inhumanity is simply beyond expression for ‘normal’ people.

Hayes presents his extremely sober and meticulous analysis of ‘Why?’ in a set of sub-issues. Within each issue his arguments are extremely well-documented and succinct. While there are elements of his own research, given the magnitude of his undertaking most of the material has been sourced from elsewhere. What is probably most original is his debunking of certain myths that have circulated from time to time in matters ranging from popular involvement in the programme of annihilation to the responses to that programme by non-Germans.

Hayes gives his own summary of conclusions for each issue at the end of the book. But here is my interpretation of his results issue by issue:

1. Why the Jews? Because it had become a tradition over millennia in Christian Europe to attribute any local or national misfortune to a Jewish presence.

2. Why the Germans? Because the particular economic and social conditions of Weimar Germany formed an opportunity for Hitler to take power.

3. Why murder? Because the Nazis were allowed to by the German populace through a carefully controlled programme of escalating violence against Jews and necessitated by the regime’s inability to expel Jews faster than it conquered them.

4. Why annihilation? Because by 1941 the Germans had nothing to lose either domestically or internationally, and the cost of the effort was insignificant.

5. Why wasn’t Jewish resistance more vigorous? Because their situation was manifestly hopeless and the Nazi strategy of annihilation was directed against whole communities which they manipulated expertly to minimise resistance.

6. Why did some Jews nevertheless survive? Because the Germans ran out of time in their latter conquests, allowing a quarter of European Jews to escape not through Gentile assistance but German defeat.

7. Why was immediate assistance to surviving victims, and longer term resettlement and restitution so difficult to obtain? Because it wasn’t considered in the interests of the victorious Western countries in the context of Cold War politics.

Certainly my summary interpretations cannot capture the extensive detail or nuance of Hayes’s exposition. And he does throw a number historical red herrings back in the sea. And, as a non-professional, I find his reasoning compelling.

Nevertheless, does the book really ‘explain’ the Holocaust? It makes it seem that all of the historical threads which created and sustained the massacre were merely a lack of good fortune, a perfect storm of human insanity and inhumanity. If one or more causal elements had been lacking, perhaps it needn’t have happened, at least with such massive ferocity.

Perhaps this is all any historian can do. But I don’t find it satisfying. The evil which was manifest in the Holocaust and so well presented by Hayes did not arise from the intersection of historical events and opportunities. The evil was there waiting, perhaps in Western culture, probably in religious institutions and the civil institutions derived from them, certainly in a very deep flaw in human psychology.

A superior explanation, therefore, it seems to me, is that human beings are simply not fit for purpose. It is not the case that there are merely some bad apples. The entire gene pool is maladapted to life on earth. As antisemitism and other irrational prejudices again resurface, apparently spontaneously, around the world, this conclusion presses itself forward as the only real explanation. There are, it seems, no normal people. Nor is there a solution to be found to our unfitness through finding reasons for such tragedy.

Perhaps I am simply ignorant.

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