–OpEd–
BERLIN — The Red Army soldiers who reached the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945, looked into the abyss of an unprecedented crime against humanity.
For around one million Jews who had been factory-murdered there, any rescue came too late. The survivors, more dead than alive, presented a horrifying sight.
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Today, 80 years later, Auschwitz has become a code word for the Shoah as a whole, and the appeal “Auschwitz, Never Again” has become a warning — especially in the country of the perpetrators — to protect Jewish life and to counteract anti-Semitism wherever it appears.
But the code word Auschwitz also conceals something else. It makes many other places of extermination pale into insignificance. And it sometimes makes us forget that although the National Socialist policy of extermination culminated in the mass murder of European Jews and an eliminatory “anti-Semitism of redemption” (Saul Friedländer) formed its ideological core, its victims also included other groups.
The other victims
The history of the Auschwitz camp itself tells the story: before it became the “capital of the Holocaust”, as historian Peter Hayes put it, political prisoners were imprisoned here, mainly Poles. Soviet prisoners of war — a total of 3.3 million of whom perished in German camps — were also murdered in Auschwitz. There was also a camp for Sinti and Roma. Last but not least, Auschwitz — with the nearby IG Farben chemical factory — was a center of Nazi slave labor.
The social Darwinism was also deadly for millions of people
It was not only the anti-Semitism of Hitler and his followers that was murderous.
Their anti-Slavic racism, their anti-ziganism, their determination to ruthlessly exploit all those excluded from the German “national community” and their social Darwinism were also deadly for millions of people.
It was no coincidence that the Nazi perpetrators developed the murder technique of “gassing” people from one of the most vulnerable groups in society: the sick and disabled. Others were sent to concentration camps because they were homosexual or considered “work-shy”.
The destruction of truth
It is therefore not enough to look at National Socialism from the end, from Jan. 27, 1945. There is also the question of when and how the road to Auschwitz began.
Certainly, German history did not roll inexorably towards Auschwitz like the wagons carrying deportees from half of Europe. Sociologists and historians have repeatedly pointed out that the dehumanizing violence also arose from the war situation.
But even if the mass murder of European Jews did not necessarily result from the anti-Semitism of the German Empire, without political writer Heinrich von Treitschke (“The Jews are our misfortune”) — a street in Berlin named after him is now finally being renamed — and without the ultranationalist journalism of the early 20th century, the Nazi ideology would probably not have taken hold so strongly, and with such devastating consequences in all sections of the German population.
The road to Auschwitz began with the delusion of ethnic homogeneity, with a biologistic idea of inequality that differentiated between valuable and less valuable life. It began with the contempt for social plurality and democratic polyphony. And it began with the destruction of truth through a propagandistic machinery of lies.
In the eyes of the National Socialists, “world Jewry” as such, a universal and incongruent hate figure embodied everything “alien to the people” and contrary to nationalist thinking: the Marxist, “Bolshevik” promise of equality as well as Western democratic liberal modernity.
Dual enemy
Today’s New Right — with its hatred of “globalists” and “cultural Marxists” — cultivates the same dual enemy image.
Nevertheless, many right-wingers do not want to see themselves “placed in the right-wing corner”, as they say. On the public stage, they are therefore always anxious to cut the connecting lines that stretch from the ethno-nationalist ideas of the pre-war period to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz thus becomes the crime of others.
Nothing lends itself more to this than striking an anti-fascist pose. Vladimir Putin is staging himself as a fighter against alleged fascism in Ukraine. Donald Trump also likes to discredit his democratic opponents as fascists. AfD leader Alice Weidel, on the other hand, declared Hitler a communist without further ado in a conversation with Elon Musk.
Auschwitz thus becomes the crime of others.
Flirting with Nazi symbols
These are flimsy attempts to de-Nazify the origins of their own authoritarian thinking — which is evident from the fact that they can flirt all the more freely with National Socialist symbols in their slipstream.
Elon Musk’s Hitler salute, which was supposedly not a Hitler salute, is just the latest example. And when the crowd at the AfD party conference chanted “Alice für Deutschland” (“Alice for Germany”), it was no coincidence that this sounded like the incriminated “brown shirts” slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”).
On Holocaust Remembrance Day in particular, the right must be confronted with the fact that this call leads back to the past.
What is needed is a policy that aims to create the opposite: a Germany for everyone who lives here.
