Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust

Callinicos, Alex.

The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2001,

pp. 385-414 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/yale.2001.0020

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale/summary/v014/14.2callinicos.html

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Alex Callinicos

Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust

Nothing challenges Marxism more directly than the Holocaust.1 As at

once heir and critic of the Enlightenment, Marx sought to expose the
social limits of its aspiration to universal emancipation through the
power of reason by tracing the material roots of its ideals to what he
called the “hidden abode” of production. At the same time, he radi-
calized these ideals into the ethical and political drive to rid the world
of all forms of exploitation and oppression—what as a young man he
proclaimed to be “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in
which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.”2
The Holocaust is—for good reasons I need not rehearse here—gen-
erally held to be the most extreme case of human evil. All the differ-
ent kinds of domination fused together in Auschwitz—racism, di-
rected at Jews, Slavs, and Roma; the economic exploitation of slave
labour; the oppression of gays and women; the persecution of dissent-
ing minorities such as Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. No hu-
man phenomenon can put a stronger demand on the explanatory
powers of Marxism. Indeed, it might be reasonable to doubt whether
any social theory can throw light into the darkness of Auschwitz.

Explanation and Silence

Some of course think that it is wrong even to try. For the Auschwitz
survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust “negates
all answers,”“lies outside, if not beyond, history,”“defies both knowl-
edge and description,” is “never to be comprehended or transmitted.”3
Similarly any attempt to compare the Holocaust with other atrocities
is denounced. Thus, according to Deborah Lipstadt, casting doubt on
the uniqueness of the Holocaust is “far more insidious than outright
denial. It nurtures and is nurtured by Holocaust-denial.”4
This attitude seems to me profoundly mistaken. It should be obvi-
ous that any serious attempt to demonstrate the uniqueness of the
Holocaust can only proceed by, if only implicitly, drawing compar-
isons between the Nazi genocide and other cases of mass murder.5
Often the refusal to compare conceals less a religious respect for the
victims than more mundane ideological and political motives. Thus in
 the Israeli government persuaded Wiesel and other prominent
The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number  (): 385–414
©  by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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American Jews to withdraw from a major international academic con-

ference in Tel Aviv because a session on the Armenian genocide of
 would embarrass that good ally of Israel and the United States,
the Turkish state.6
More fundamentally, the point of Holocaust commemoration is
surely not only to acknowledge the suffering of the victims but also
to help sustain a political consciousness that is on guard against any
signs of the repetition of Nazi crimes. But any informed judgement
of the probability of such a repetition depends on an understanding of
the forces that produced it in the first place. The slogan of the Anti-
Nazi League—“NEVER AGAIN!”—is meaningless unless we have
some idea of the nature of what we want to stop happening again.
W.G. Runciman has drawn a useful distinction between the explana-
tion and the description of a social event. The first seeks to identify
the causal mechanism(s) responsible for that event; the second, by con-
trast, seeks “to understand . . . what it was like for the agent to do” the
actions in question—to reconstruct the experiences of the partici-
pants.7 Describing the Holocaust in this sense—showing what it was
like to be a victim, or indeed a perpetrator or a bystander—is perhaps
best left to autobiography of different kinds and to art (though there
is, of course, a major debate over the ways in which it is appropriate
to represent it).8
That social theory can help to explain how Auschwitz was possible
is shown by a few distinguished works, perhaps most notably Zyg-
munt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. But it must be said that
the direct contribution that Marxism has made to this body of work
is very limited. On the whole the Holocaust has been cited in Marx-
ist writing as the most extreme case of the general evils of modern
capitalist society. The Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel (who as a
young Resistance activist barely escaped consignment to Auschwitz
himself) can be taken as representative of the classical Marxist tradi-
tion. Norman Geras, in an important critical essay to which I shall re-
turn, characterizes Mandel’s position thus:“According to him, the de-
struction of the Jews of Europe is rationally explicable as the product of
imperialist capitalism, and as such it is manifestly comparable to the other
barbarisms which this socio-economic formation.”9
Thus Mandel argues that “the germ of the Holocaust is to be found
in colonialism’s and imperialism’s extreme racism,” interacting in the
context of total war with “the peculiar—and increasingly destruc-
tive—suicidal combination of ‘perfect’ local rationality and extreme
global irrationality which characterizes international capitalism.”10 As
Geras observes,“Mandel offers preciously little sense, and certainly no
attempt at an elaboration, of the singularity or specificity of the
Shoah.”11 But it is important to see that a similar lack of specificity is
characteristic of less orthodox Marxists than Mandel.

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Thus in Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor

Adorno devote a famous essay to “Elements of Anti-Semitism” which
essentially treats Nazi ideology and the murder of the Jews as an ex-
emplification of the general tendency towards rationalization that they
claim is characteristic of modernity: nature, repressed and dominated
within the framework of the “totally administered society,” returns in
a barbarous and irrational form. The Holocaust is thereby reduced to
a symptom of a more universal disorder.12 In Age of Extremes, a much
more recent and widely praised Marxist narrative of the “Short Twen-
tieth Century” (–), Eric Hobsbawm similarly treats the exter-
mination of the Jews as merely the best-known case of the epoch’s
slide into barbarity: his discussion of the impact of fascism focuses on
the Popular Fronts initiated in response by the Communist Parties
rather than on the atrocities perpetrated by National Socialism.13
This lack of focus on the Holocaust itself as a specific phenomenon
is, of course, far from peculiar to Marxism. The paradoxical tendency
for the extermination of the Jews to become a more intense preoccu-
pation the further its actual occurrence recedes into the past is a strik-
ing feature of Western culture at the end of the th century that has
recently itself become an object of historical interpretation and con-
troversy. But if this preoccupation requires explanation, so too does
the comparative silence on the Holocaust in the first decades after the
war, when memories of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis were still
fresh. Enzo Traverso, who has, like Norman Geras, has made an im-
portant contribution to developing a distinctively Marxist response to
the Holocaust over the past few years, argues that, on the left at least,
this silence reflected the renewed hold of Enlightenment optimism:
The defeat of Nazism, the Red Army’s advance into Central Europe and the impres-
sive growth of Communist parties in countries where they had played a leading role
in the Resistance all encouraged a return in the immediate postwar period to a phi-
losophy of progress. This left little room for thinking through the catastrophe. Marx-
ism was thus characterized by its silence on the subject of Auschwitz.14

This seems to me, as a general explanation, quite wrong. Peter Novick

in his outstanding study of representations of the Holocaust in the
United States argues that both during and immediately after the Sec-
ond World War the extermination of the Jews was conceived not as a
singular event but rather in “universalist” terms, as no doubt the worst
of the Nazis’ crimes but not one that could be distinguished from the
atrocities perpetrated against gentiles.15 To drop briefly into the auto-
biographical mode, I grew up in the s and s in a social envi-
ronment from which Jews were almost completely absent, but where
knowledge of the Nazis crimes was shared by adults personally ac-
quainted with them—my father lived in Greece under the German
occupation, while my best friend’s parents had experienced both Nazi

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and Stalinist rule in their native Poland. Remembering how we talked

and what we read about the war, my dominant impression is that of a
continuity of atrocity—awareness of Auschwitz was part of a broader
sense of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on Jew and gentile alike.
It is at the very least open to argument that whether more “partic-
ularist” preoccupation with the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish ex-
perience that has gained strength in recent decades necessarily consti-
tutes a more profound understanding of the Nazi genocide. Both
Novick and (in a much more problematic way) Norman Finkelstein
have documented the mundane geopolitical and even economic in-
terests that have invested the proliferating discourse on the Holo-
caust.16 This is not to say that Traverso is wrong to indict Marxism for
its failure to confront the Holocaust in its specificity. But the explana-
tion may lie elsewhere than in the evolutionary and determinist opti-
mism that he holds responsible. Tim Mason, perhaps the greatest
Marxist historian of the Third Reich, confessed:
I have always remained emotionally, and thus intellectually, paralysed in front of what
the Nazis did and what their victims suffered.The enormity of these actions and these
sufferings both imperatively demanded description and analysis, and at the same time
totally defied them. I could neither face the facts of genocide, nor walk away from
them and study a less demanding subject. I find it almost impossible to read the
sources, or the studies and testimonies which have been written on the subject. I
know that many other historians of Nazism have had a similar experience.17

This kind of paralysis of imagination before the Holocaust may have

more than personal roots. Mason was a leading figure in the school of
“history from below” that emerged under the inspiration of Edward
Thompson, Christopher Hill, and others in the s and s. This
intellectual current sought to recover the episodes of resistance hid-
den from (or perhaps better by) more conventional versions of histo-
riography. Mason’s own work constituted a particularly remarkable
case of such restitution as he reconstructed the forms taken by work-
ing-class struggle under the Hitler regime. It is not hard to see how a
historical intelligence preoccupied with the capacity of the exploited
to assert their interests even in the most unfavourable conditions
might have found it hard to contemplate the comprehensive eradica-
tion of all hope in the death camps.

Facing Evil
The lacuna whose presence Mason retrospectively acknowledged in
his own major writings—“[t]he absence of biological politics and
genocide”—has certainly been removed in the contemporary histori-
ography of National Socialism.18 Raul Hilberg’s great pioneering
work The Destruction of the European Jews no longer stands alone: a host

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of excellent studies, increasingly contributed by German historians,

have greatly enhanced our understanding of the nature and driving
forces of the Holocaust.19
But can Marxism contribute anything to this understanding? Nor-
man Geras and Enzo Traverso in their writings on the Holocaust both
take as their main intellectual and political reference points the classi-
cal Marxist tradition of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Luxem-
burg and Gramsci. But they argue, from different theoretical perspec-
tives, that this tradition, at least as presently constituted, is of little help
in making sense of the Holocaust. I share with them this same tradi-
tion, but disagree with the conclusion they both draw. To bring out
why I think Marxism can help illuminate even the Nazi genocide, it
may be helpful to consider the reasons that Geras gives for holding
Marxism wanting. (I return to Traverso below.)
Geras, as we have seen, believes that the kind of historical contex-
tualization practised by Mandel, which explains the Holocaust in
terms of more general features of capitalism such as racism, colonial-
ism, and instrumental rationality fails to capture what is specific to the
murder of the Jews. Such analyses slide over a crucial feature of the
perpetrators’ motivations that Geras argues was well captured by Trot-
sky, writing decades earlier, when he described the pogroms perpe-
trated by the Tsarist Black Hundreds in reaction to the Russian Rev-
olution of . Geras has in mind in particular this truly striking
passage:
Everything is allowed him [the member of the anti-Semitic gang], he is capable of
anything, he is the master of property and honour, of life and death. If he wants to, he
can throw an old woman out of a third-floor window together with a grand piano,
he can smash a chair against a baby’s head, rape a small girl while the entire crowd
moves on, hammer a nail . . . He exterminates whole families, he pours petrol over a
house, transforms it into a mass of flames, and if anyone dares to escape, he finishes
him off with a cudgel . . . There exist no tortures, figments of a feverish brain mad-
dened by alcohol and fury, at which he need ever stop. He is capable of anything, he
dares everything.20

This experience of the barbarous impulses unleashed by counter-

revolution made it possible, Geras argues, for Trotsky thirty years later
to anticipate the Holocaust, predicting in December  that “the
next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the phys-
ical extermination of the Jews.”21
Already long before  Trotsky had seen into the depths. He had seen the spirit of
limitless excess, the exaltation people can feel in exercising a merciless power over
others and the “total-ness” there can be in a humiliation—both the horror and the
joy that is taken in inflicting it, lethal couple in what is already an annihilation. He
had seen also one of the most terrifying faces of human freedom, self-consciously
turned against its other, better faces. In all of this he had seen part of what would sub-

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sequently be in the Shoah, including the element of an irreducible choice. The pre-
conditions and the surrounding context of this kind of choice can and always must
be explored and described. But it remains in the end what it is: underdetermined, a
choice.22
Though this was the insight of what he calls a “powerful and cre-
ative Marxist intellect,” for Geras it goes beyond the limits of a con-
ventional Marxism, preoccupied as that is with precisely the “precon-
ditions and surrounding context” to which the will to destroy revealed
in both the Tsarist pogroms and the Holocaust itself cannot be re-
duced. It highlights that aspect of the Holocaust that he believes tends
to get neglected in interpretations such as Baumann’s that stress the
role played characteristic structures of modernity—for example, the
bureaucratic division of labour and the large-scale use of technol-
ogy—in allowing many perpetrators to distance themselves emotion-
ally as well as physically from the crimes they were helping to com-
mit. Geras argues that such analyses fail to give proper weight to “the
cruel desires and sense of an unusual elation, . . . the emotional charge
produced—and maybe required—by the assault upon the innocent”
evident in many descriptions of Nazi atrocities. “There is something
here that is not about modernity; something that is not about capital-
ism. It is about humanity.”23
As this last sentence implies, Geras’s argument rests ultimately on a
certain view of human nature. Elsewhere he makes this assumption
explicit, contending that a capacity for evil is an intrinsic feature of
human nature co-existing with more benign traits, and that socialist
theory and practice must take proper account of this potential.24 The
intuition expressed in the passage from Trotsky that Geras cites is in-
deed one that any proper understanding of mass murder must accom-
modate. A remarkably similar analysis of the psychological mechanism
described here by Trotsky was recently offered from the perspective of
an idiosyncratically Lacanian Marxism by Slavoj Žižek:
although, on the surface, the totalitarian Master . . . imposes severe orders, compelling
us to renounce our pleasures and to sacrifice ourselves to some higher Duty, his ac-
tual injunction, discernible beneath the lines of his explicit words, is exactly the op-
posite—the call to unconstrained and unrestrained transgression. Far from imposing on
us a firm set of standards to be obeyed unconditionally, the totalitarian Master that
suspends (moral) punishment—that is to say, his secret injunction is You may!: the pro-
hibitions that seem to regulate social life and guarantee a minimum of decency are
ultimately worthless, just a device to keep the common people at bay, while you are
allowed to kill, rape and plunder the Enemy, let yourself go and excessively enjoy, vi-
olate ordinary moral prohibitions . . . in so far as you follow Me!25

So a real insight is present here. It is, however, only a partial one. On

its own it suffers from the same lack of specificity for which Geras
takes to task Mandel’s interpretation of the Holocaust. Simply to in-
voke a human capacity for evil, the perverse liberation we can enjoy

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through the unrestrained infliction of suffering on the Other, in order

to explain the extermination of the Jews fails to connect with the fact
that this episode—ghastly beyond imagining though it was—was pre-
cisely that, a historical episode limited in time and space. On its own
this idea recalls one of my favourite Woody Allen characters, Freder-
ick, the melancholic artist played by Max von Sydow in Hannah and
Her Sisters, who dismisses as idiotic all the agonizing over why the
Holocaust happened, since the real question is why it doesn’t happen
all the time.
Formally Geras can accommodate this objection: his aim, as he
makes clear, is to offer a corrective to other, more social explanations
invoking capitalism and modernity. But filling the picture in can’t be
just be a matter of adding the kind of list of material, social, and ide-
ological preconditions of the Holocaust that Mandel, for example, sets
out. Thinking that it can would imply conceiving the role of the so-
cial context merely as providing the precipitant that releases the de-
structive impulses lurking beneath the surface. The context would
then be the form filled by the urge to transgress. But the relationship
between social and psychological mechanisms is much more complex
and dynamic than is suggested by these metaphors. In the case of the
Holocaust, the key mediating element is provided by the nature of
National Socialism itself.26

Revolution and Counter-Revolution

Here we must come to terms with one of the greatest achievements
of classical Marxism, Trotsky’s analysis of fascism, developed in the
early s as the Nazis made their play for power. Remarkably, both
Geras and Traverso, despite the great respect they accord Trotsky, ef-
fectively deny the relevance of this analysis to an understanding of the
Holocaust. Thus Traverso writes:“The Jewish genocide cannot be un-
derstood in depth as a function of the class interests of big German
capital—this is, in truth, the interpretive criterion ‘in the final analy-
sis’ of all Marxist theories of fascism—it can only be caricatured.”27
But this criticism effectively caricatures Trotsky’s theory. The idea
that Nazism—and fascism more generally—was the instrument of big
capital was indeed an incontestable dogma of the Communist Inter-
national under Stalin. The thought was expressed in more or less
crude ways—for example, by John Strachey when he called fascism
“one of the methods which may be adopted by the capitalist class
when the threat of the working class to the stability of monopoly cap-
italism becomes acute,” and by Georgi Dimitrov, offering the official
Comintern definition of fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the
most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance
capital.”28 The same idea was visually dramatized in John Heartfield’s

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famous photomontage “The Real Meaning of the Hitler Salute,” where

capitalist gold is seen pouring into the Führer’s outstretched hand.29
Particularly when focused on the rise of National Socialism Trot-
sky’s analysis avoids such crude portrayals of Hitler as a mere puppet
of big capital. Its originality lies in Trotsky’s appraisal of Nazism as a
mass movement, which can be brought out by considering two con-
trasting historical interpretations of National Socialism. One of the
most distinguished recent attempts to arrive at a totalizing under-
standing of the Holocaust is Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not
Darken? Mayer’s argument, summed up by the title of the German
translation of his book—Der Krieg als Kreuzzug (The War as Crusade)—
rests on a comparison between what he calls the “Judeocide” and the
widespread massacres of Jews that accompanied the First Crusade at
the end of the th century. He contends that Operation Barbarossa—
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June —was a modern
anti-Bolshevik crusade supported by the upper classes of continental
Europe desperate to eradicate the Red menace.
In an earlier study Mayer had argued that the ancien regime in its es-
sential features—the social and political dominance of landed elites—
survived until .30 What he calls “the General Crisis and Thirty
Years War of the twentieth century”—the epoch of catastrophe be-
tween  and —represented the crisis of the ancien regime. Its
main characteristic was the counter-revolutionary resistance of the old
elites to the threat represented to their privileges by the Russian Rev-
olution and the international Communist movement it inspired. Even
National Socialism was an expression of this impulse. “While he
[Hitler] drummed up mass support for Nazism among those in the
middle orders of German society who were, or felt themselves victims
of modernization, he found his essential collaborators among mem-
bers of the old elites who were moved less by political faith than by
material and personal interest.” This pattern, set by the time Hitler
seized power, was also operative during Barbarossa: “the Nazis loudly
proclaimed that the war against Soviet Russia was a Glaubenskrieg [war
of faiths] against ‘Judeobolshevism,’ which initially earned them con-
siderable sympathy and support among conservatives, reactionaries,
and fascists throughout the Continent.” It was the failure of this en-
terprise that prompted Hitler and his henchmen to vent their rage and
despair on the Jews by unleashing the Holocaust: “the escalation and
systematization of the assault on the Jews was an expression, not of
soaring hubris on the eve of victory, but of bewilderment and fear in
the face of possible defeat. Indeed, the decision to exterminate the
Jews marked the incipient debacle of the Nazi Behemoth, not its im-
minent triumph.”31
This last thesis—that the “Judeocide” was a by-product of Nazi
plans for the conquest of the East going awry—has provoked consid-

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erable criticism from other historians of the Holocaust.32 Mayer’s

overall interpretation of National Socialism has nevertheless the un-
doubted merit of underlining the complicity of traditional German
elites, not merely—as is well known—in Hitler’s attaining the Chan-
cellorship, but also in his regime’s later crimes. Thus it was the Army
High Command that drafted the so-called “Commissar Order” of 
June , which decreed that in the interests of “[t]he struggle against
Bolshevism,” Soviet political commissars were to summarily shot.33
This order provided the authority for the massacres carried out by the
SS Einsatzgruppen after the invasion of the USSR. The image of a
“good” Wehrmacht that, on the whole, kept its hands clean has not sur-
vived historians’ scrutiny. In Serbia, for example, it was the Wehrmacht
that murdered all adult male Jews and Roma.34
The formative as well destructive power of counter-revolution oc-
cupies the centre of Mayer’s historical imagination.35 But, whatever
we may think of this as an interpretation of modern European history,
it leads him into a much too undifferentiated view of National So-
cialism. In particular, he underestimates the conflicts dividing the
Nazis from the dominant class. To cite merely the most obvious ex-
ample: some of the proudest names of the German aristocracy—
among them Bismarck, Metternich, and Möltke—were implicated in
the plot to assassinate Hitler on July  ; the savage revenge sub-
sequently taken by the SS cut a swathe through the upper echelons of
the Prussian military.36 In his history of the resistance to Hitler,
Joachim Fest argues that it is a misunderstanding of “the real nature of
the Nazi revolution” to think that “National Socialism was essentially
a conservative movement. In reality it was egalitarian and destructive
of traditional structures.”37 Though Fest writes for the conservative
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung his view of Nazism can claim support
from studies of everyday life produced by historians at the opposite
end of the political spectrum that highlight the extent to which mod-
ernizing processes already under way in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar
Republic continued, and sometimes accelerated under Hitler.38
Revolution and counter-revolution—these contrasting images of
National Socialism by the conservative journalist Fest and the “left-
dissident historian” Mayer—sum up the difficulties in grasping the na-
ture of this regime and therefore the sources of its crimes.39 Both in-
terpretations can cite historical evidence in their support, but neither
seems really satisfactory. It is here that Trotsky’s analysis is of help. One
might summarize his view as follows: National Socialism as the most
developed form of fascism is counter-revolution in the guise of revolution.40
It is counter-revolutionary inasmuch as in taking power it seeks to
eradicate the organized working class—“razing to their foundations
all the institutions of proletarian democracy,” political parties, trade
unions, and other more informal associations.41 It was his recognition

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of the mortal threat that Nazism represented to the German workers’

movement that gives Trotsky’s writings of the early s their ur-
gency and their prophetic power as he pressed, in vain, for a united
front of the left against Hitler. As Nicos Poulantzas notes, he was “al-
most alone in predicting, in an astonishing fashion, the unfolding of
the process in Germany.”42
But it was his understanding of the nature of the threat that consti-
tuted Trotsky’s most important insight. The aim of destroying the orga-
nized working class was one of the points of convergence between the
Nazis and many leading industrialists, bankers, generals, and landown-
ers. Yet the Nazis as a mass movement represented a far more effective
means of carrying out this task than the conventional forces of the state:
At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dic-
tatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society
in a state of equilibrium, the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist
agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of
the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings
whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. From fascism the
bourgeoisie demands a thorough job . . . And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty
bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thor-
ough job.43

This was the historic contribution of National Socialism. It fused into

a movement the petty bourgeoisie—small businessmen, white-collar
employees, and peasants—traumatized by world war, revolution, infla-
tion, and world depression:
While the Nazis acted as a party and not as a state power, they did not quite find an
approach to the working class. On the other side, the big bourgeoisie, even those who
supported Hitler with money, did not consider his party theirs. The national “renais-
sance” leaned wholly upon the middle classes, the most backward part of the nation,
the heavy ballast of history. Political art consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie into
oneness through its common hostility to the proletariat. What must be done in order
to improve things? First of all, throttle those who are underneath. Impotent before big
capital, the petty bourgeoisie hopes in the future to regain its social dignity through
the ruin of the workers.44

Trotsky’s analysis of the class basis of National Socialism, which por-

trays it as the mass movement of those caught between big capital and
organized labour, is supported by recent historic research.45 Yet if the
social meaning of Nazism was to direct the negative energies released
by Mayer’s “general crisis of the th century” onto the workers’
movement, it was only able to do so by means of a powerful pseudo-
revolutionary rhetoric. This involved what Daniel Guerin called
“demagogic anti-capitalism.”46 Nazi ideology was anti-capitalist in the
restricted sense of holding “Jewish finance capital” responsible for all
the ills of German society. Counterposed to Weimar realities was the
Utopia of the Volksgemeinschaft—of a racially pure national commu-

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nity where German capital and labour were reconciled and the small
producer finally in the saddle. Here we see the centrality of racism to
National Socialism. Their supposedly common biological “race”
united Germans of all classes against the alien Jews and against other
inferior races, especially the Slavs, with whom, according Hitler’s So-
cial Darwinism, Germans were in competition for territory and re-
sources in the East.47
This racist, pseudo-revolutionary ideology provided the cement of
National Socialism as a mass movement. Trotsky noted that the ple-
beian, anti-capitalist character of Nazi ideology made using Hitler
risky for the German ruling class:“this method has its dangers. While
it makes use of fascism, the bourgeoisie nevertheless fears it.” Else-
where he wrote: “The political mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie
against the proletariat . . . is inconceivable without that social dema-
gogy which means playing with fire for the big bourgeoisie.” But,
though thus sensitive to the conflicts between the Nazis and the rul-
ing class, Trotsky assumed these would tend to be overcome once the
former took power, when the specificity of fascism as a distinctive
type of mass movement would progressively disappear: “as the Italian
example shows, fascism leads in the end to a military-bureaucratic dic-
tatorship of the Bonapartist type.” This implies a significant difference
between Nazism out of and in power:
German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty
bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the
working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the
rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of
monopoly capital.48

But, far from finishing up as a military dictatorship, the Nazi regime

massacred the generals after the July  plot. Poulantzas, criticizing
Trotsky among others for having failed to grasp the specificity of fas-
cism as a variant of the “exceptional” form of the capitalist state, ar-
gued that a stabilized fascist regime was characterized by the domi-
nance within the state apparatus of the political police.49 Certainly this
corresponds well to the final phase of the Nazi regime, in which the
SS and its police arm, the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office), ac-
quired ever greater prominence, a process symbolized by Himmler’s
appointment on  July  to command the reserve army, in what
Fest calls “a well-calculated gesture of contempt” on Hitler’s part to-
wards the officer corps.50 But while Poulantzas’ criticisms of Trotsky
seems to me correct here, his general approach—stressing as it does
the idea of the “relative autonomy of the state”—does not capture the
complexity of the relationship between National Socialism and Ger-
man capital.
This is best characterized as a conflictual partnership.51 It was based on

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a limited convergence of interests between the Nazis and sections of

German capital (particularly those associated with heavy industry)
who shared common objectives, notably the destruction of the organ-
ized working class and a imperial program of expansion into the East.
Even before the onset of the Great Depression, the leaders of heavy
industry were in revolt against the Weimar republic, denouncing it as
a “trade union state” whose commitment to social welfare and institu-
tionalized collective bargaining imposed excessively high costs on Ger-
man capitalism: in this respect the iron-and-steel lock-out of Novem-
ber  marked a turning point.52 From the fall of the Grand Coalition
in March  onwards, the industrialists’ intransigence against the
background of a spectacularly deteriorating economic situation
helped to doom liberal democracy in Germany. Ian Kershaw writes:
During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately under-
mined by elite groups serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers,
but—however reactionary their political aims—modern lobbies working to further
their vested interests in an authoritarian system. In the final drama, the agrarians and
the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover. But
big business also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to
the undermining of democracy that was the necessary prelude to Hitler’s success.53

The relationship between big business and the Nazis after Hitler’s ac-
cession to the Chancellorship was riddled with tensions. The conser-
vatives’ hopes of incorporating the Nazis as junior partners were soon
dashed. Hitler and his followers used the reign of terror they launched
against the organized working class both to demonstrate their useful-
ness to those who had brought them to power and also to conquer
exclusive control of the state (with the exception of the Reichswehr).
To quote Kershaw once again:
Only Hitler, and the huge—if potentially unstable—mass movement he headed, could
ensure control of the streets and bring about the “destruction of Marxism,” the basis
of the desired counter-revolution. Yet precisely this dependence on Hitler and eager-
ness to back the most ruthless measures adopted in the early weeks and months of the
new regime guaranteed that the weakness of the traditional elite groups would be laid
bare in the years to come as the intended counter-revolution gave way to the Nazi racial
revolution in Europe and opened the path to world conflagration and genocide.54

The Night of Long Knives ( June ) assuaged elite fears of
Nazi plebeian radicalism by eliminating Ernst Röhm and other lead-
ers of the SA (storm-troopers) who advocated a “Second Revolu-
tion,” but at the price of entrenching the Nazis in power and, in par-
ticular, allowing the SS (who carried out the massacre with the help
of the army), to extend their control of the security apparatus. The
months of – saw a further radicalization of the regime made
possible by the removal of the chiefs of the military (Blomberg and
Fritsch) and of Hjalmar Schacht, who had previously dominated the

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regime’s economic policy. These personnel changes, which signifi-

cantly increased the control of the state exercised by Hitler and other
top Nazis, were accompanied by a more determined pursuit of eco-
nomic autarky and by the adoption of a more aggressive foreign pol-
icy—moves that, of course, formed the context of the train of events
leading to the outbreak of the Second World War.55
There has been considerable debate among historians of the Third
Reich about the role played by the domestic problems of the Nazi
regime—including class conflict—in fuelling the drive to war.56 The
leading Marxist contributor to this debate, Tim Mason, has also fa-
mously put forward the thesis that the Nazi regime was characterized
by the “primacy of politics”:
From  onwards the framework of economic action in Germany was increasingly
defined by the political leadership. The needs of the economy were determined by
political decisions, principally by decisions in foreign policy, and the satisfaction of
these needs was provided for by military victories . . . The large firms identified them-
selves with National Socialism for the sake of their own further economic develop-
ment. Their desire for profit and expansion, which was fully met by the political sys-
tem, together with the stubborn nationalism of their leaders, did, however, bind them
to a government on whose aims, in as much as they were subject to control at all, they
had virtually no influence.57

Mason’s formulation has the considerable merit of closing the door to

any vulgar Marxist attempt to reduce the Holocaust and other Nazi
crimes to the economic needs of German capital. But it is too simple
to try to map the distinction between the National Socialist regime
and German private capital onto a broader one between politics and
economics. For a key feature of the “radicalization” of the regime in
– was the development of the state as an independent source of
economic power. Schacht’s fall was accompanied by Göring’s emer-
gence as the dominant figure in Nazi economic policy-making. The
shift to greater state direction and to some extent replacement of pri-
vate enterprise was symbolized by the establishment of the Four-Year
Plan, with Göring at its head. In some ways more significant was the
development of the Reichswerke, also headed by the Reichsmarschall,
into a state-controlled multinational corporation that competed with
private firms, often with great success, in order to gain control of the
productive assets made available by German territorial expansion east-
wards into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and westward into
France during –. Richard Overy argues that “the German eco-
nomic empire was not won and held by private capitalism on behalf
of the ‘monopoly capitalists’ but was firmly under the control and in
large part owned and operated, by the Göring economic apparatus.”58
It is important for anyone old enough to remember the Marxist de-
bates about the state during the s and s to see that this is the
opposite of what the “stamokap” (state monopoly capitalism) theory

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then popular among the Communist Parties would predict. This in-
volved a pretty crude form of instrumentalism in which the state be-
comes the tool of a handful of big monopolists.59 Here rather the
Nazis (or, given the fragmentation of the Führerstaat, a section of the
National Socialist regime) used their control of the state to gain direct
access to the accumulation process. This helps to explain why the
Nazis did not simply, as Trotsky predicted, collapse into a conventional
military dictatorship: they converted political into economic power.
This achievement puts Mason’s “primacy of politics” into a different
light. The Hitler regime’s success in setting the parameters for private
capital was no mere act of ideological levitation, but was rather closely
associated with its success into entrenching itself in control of a large
and expanding state capital.60
This way of putting it also helps to place the evolution of National
Socialism in a wider context. For the s were marked by the dis-
integration of the world market, the contraction of foreign trade, and
a general drive by the state to supplant private enterprise that was
widely seen by left and right alike as having failed. The most extreme
case of this tendency towards state capitalism was, of course, the So-
viet Union during the so-called “Stalin revolution” of the late s
and the s, but the New Deal in the United States and the na-
tionalizations carried out even by the Tory-dominated National Gov-
ernment in Britain are other examples. The Nazis’ drive to autarky
and to war must be seen against this background: the increasing diffi-
culties faced by a largely closed German economy in obtaining scarce
raw materials through foreign trade undoubtedly played a part in
pushing the regime towards seizing them through territorial expan-
sion and military conquest.61 But the Nazis leaders’ judgement that
long-term survival depended on an imperial drive into eastern and
central Europe was an assessment they shared with key sections of
both big capital (particularly in heavy industry) and the military.62
Above all, Nazi radicalism respected certain limits: most importantly,
the basic structure of economy remained untouched. Germany under
Hitler remained an industrial capitalist society, with economic power
concentrated in the hands of big capital. From the perspective of the
basic structure of class relations, whether that capital took the form of
private enterprise or state concerns was a secondary matter. The
Utopia of a racially pure, socially homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft re-
mained just that. As Detlev Peukert puts it, “National Socialism
adapted readily to long-term trends towards modernization. In terms
of long-range socio-economic statistical data, the years of the Third
Reich (or at least the years of peace up to ) show no divergence,
either positive or negative.”63 The working class, though atomized and
subject to the end to the surveillance and terror of the Security Po-
lice, were able to use the conditions of full employment produced by

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the rearmament drive to put on pressure for wage-increases in –.

Hitler to the end was haunted by the fear that war-time privation
would provoke another revolution like that of November .64
But the development of what Peukert calls a “cartel of power elites
from industry, the armed forces and the Nazi party” did not represent
the disappearance of Nazi radicalism.65 After the curbing of the SA, it
was concentrated now in the SS, which developed into a bureaucratic
empire centred on the RSHA, but creating its own military wing (the
Waffen SS) and the WVHA (Economic-Administrative Main Office)
responsible for administering the vast system of concentration camps.
Its chiefs, Himmler and Heydrich (head of the RSHA), saw them-
selves as custodians of Nazi ideology. Himmler in particular was ob-
sessed with restoring the traditional German peasantry through a vast
programme of agrarian resettlement schemes in the East, as it fell to
German arms. This peculiar fusion of racial Utopia and security ap-
paratus in the SS bureaucracy is, as we shall see, critical to under-
standing the Holocaust.66

Ideology and Genocide

The development of research into the Holocaust over the past few
years has, in my view, definitively settled the long-running debate
among historians of the Third Reich between “functionalists’ and “in-
tentionalists.”67 The extermination of the Jews, rather than emerging
fully formed from Hitler’s long-term plans, was a piecemeal process
driven to a large extent,“from below,” by initiatives from rival power-
centres within the highly fragmented Nazi bureaucracy. To say this is
not to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. His notori-
ous “prophecy” to the Reichstag on  January —“if interna-
tional finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be
not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry,
but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”—was frequently
cited by both Hitler and his subordinates as they sought to fulfil his
prediction.68 But recognition of Hitler’s role is not inconsistent with
an analysis that highlights the complexity of the process that led to
Auschwitz. To that extent, the portrayal of the Holocaust by Martin
Broszat and Hans Mommsen as the outcome of what the latter fa-
mously called a “cumulative spiral of radicalization” is correct.69
Thus, to start with, it seems clear that mass murder of the Jews was
not the only option considered by Nazi decision-makers in the efforts
to use the opportunity offered by the world war to rid Europe of the
Jews—proposals to deport the Jews to Madagascar or to the Arctic
Circle (once the USSR had been conquered) were seriously dis-
cussed, though these plans always envisaged the death of many Jews

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through the physical deprivations caused by their forced removal and

inhospitable destination. But it was the invasion of the USSR on 
June  that created context in which the Final Solution actually
developed. Operation Barbarossa reflected the long-term aims, not
just of Hitler (as expressed, for example, in Mein Kampf) but of also key
sections of the German ruling class: the  Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
forced on Soviet Russia had briefly given Germany control of Poland,
the Ukraine, and the Baltic states. From the start the Nazi leadership
made it clear that this was not just going to be just another war but a
Vernichtungskrieg—war of extermination—waged against inferior
races—the subhuman Slavs and their “Jewish-Bolshevik” masters—to
win Lebensraum for the German Volk. Mass murder was built into the
operation from start. German military planners predicted that thirty
million Soviet citizens would die as result of the diversion of food
supplies to meet the needs of the Nazi war machine.70 The Commis-
sar order, as we have seen, authorized the German invasion forces to
execute the “Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia” whether or not they
were engaged in actual combat.
It was as part of this war of extermination that the Einsatzgruppen
were sent into the Soviet Union alongside the Wehrmacht. The mass
machine-gunnings of Jews that they carried out in the summer of
 are generally seen as the beginning of the Holocaust. But in fact
even here these massacres only approached full-scale genocide
through a series of stages. In Lithuania, for example, the initial shoot-
ings in June–July , in which about ,–, predominantly
Jewish victims perished, were confined mainly to Jewish men and
Communists. It was only in August  that the massacres extended
to virtually the entire rural Jewish population and substantial numbers
of Jewish town-dwellers. At least , Jews perished, while some
,–, more were allowed temporarily to survive the selec-
tions in the towns in order that they might work for the German war
industry. Christoph Dieckman argues that a decisive factor in the rad-
icalization of Nazi policy towards the Jews of Lithuania was the un-
expectedly slow progress of the war. This forced the revision of the
earlier “starvation plan” as the occupied parts of the Soviet Union be-
came important base areas for the Wehrmacht. Chronic food short-
ages encouraged the Nazi authorities to give priority to those whose
labour they needed: rather than feed those Jews whom they regarded
as “useless mouths” they murdered them.71
This case study illustrates the diverse factors responsible for the ex-
termination of the Jews. Various pragmatic considerations played their
part. One, as we have just seen, was the development of local food
shortages in the context of the Nazis’ failure to win the rapid victory
over the USSR they had expected. Another was competition between

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rival Nazi bureaucracies, in which the SS used their success in win-

ning overall responsibility for the Jewish Question to stake their claim
for increased political power and access to scarce resources. A further
complication was introduced by the fact that the scale of the German
victories between autumn  and summer  placed larger and
larger numbers of Jews on the Nazis’ hands. This conflicted with
Himmler’s grandiose plans (as Reich Commissioner for the Consoli-
dation of German Nationhood) to resettle ethnic Germans from all
over Central and South-Eastern Europe in the new territories being
conquered by German arms. The result was what Götz Aly calls an
“ethnic domino effect,” in which the demands from Himmler to find
living space for disgruntled ethnic Germans often stuck in resettle-
ment camps and from Nazi Gauleiter eager to make their areas juden-
frei saddled the German occupation authorities in Poland with in-
creasingly unmanageable numbers of pauperized Jews.72
Mass murder came to seem to Nazi officials as the only way out of
what they experienced as a managerial nightmare.73 Aly argues that,
after plans for the wholesale deportation of the Jews of Europe to the
more inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union (itself, as he notes, a
“comprehensive plan for medium-term biological extermination”)
had gone awry thanks to dogged Soviet resistance, a consensus devel-
oped in Nazi officialdom to murder them. It was against the back-
ground of this decision, taken according to Aly in the autumn of ,
that gassing was chosen as the main instrument of industrialized anni-
hilation, that Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and Majdanek
were developed as extermination camps, and that Auschwitz-Birkenau
took on, in addition to its existing function as a forced labour camp,
also took on the role of a site for mass murder.74
Auschwitz indeed in its varying functions sums up the plurality of
determinations that produced the Holocaust. Strategically cited at a
junction of the Central European railway system that had made it in
the late th and early th centuries a key stopping off point in the
seasonal movement of Polish agricultural labourers to work in Ger-
many and Austria, the little Galician town of Oswiecim became the
site of, first, a SS concentration camp to service the Nazi terror in
freshly conquered Poland; then a centre for Himmler’s plans to resettle
ethnic Germans in the farms stolen from their expelled Polish own-
ers; then, because of its proximity to the Upper Silesian coalfield and
the availability of Soviet prisoners of war as slave labourers, I.G. Far-
ben’s buna synthetic rubber plant; and, finally, the extermination camp
into which so many of the Jews of Europe vanished.75
Aly describes the process from which the Holocaust emerged as an
instance of what he calls the Nazis’“practice of projective conflict res-
olution”:

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The conflicts of interest between the various power centres of the Third Reich,
which were constantly losing or gaining importance and influence, arose out of the
tension between differing and generally hypetrophied goals (of conquest), sanitized
social utopias, and the notorious scarcity of the materials necessary for these. Even
when the representatives of the various institutions pursued conflicting, mutually ex-
clusive interests, they were willing to work together to resolve the conflicts necessarily
produced by their divergent strategies—especially the intended speed of their imple-
mentation—with the help of theft, slave labour, and extermination.76

Critical to this process was the often only implicit role played by
biological racism in providing the framework of debate and the basis
on which decisions could be legitimized. The following remark of
Hitler’s to Himmler in  comes as close as he ever did to
acknowledging the Holocaust, but it is also highly revealing of the
character of this ideology:“The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of
the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle
in which we are engaged is of the same sort as the battle waged, dur-
ing the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have
their origin in the Jewish virus! . . . We shall regain our health only be
eliminating the Jew.”77
This medical language (also present in the common Nazi use of the
word “cleansing” as a euphemism for mass murder) is symptomatic of
a pseudo-scientific ideology that posited a hierarchical world of races
from which the “unfit” should be eliminated. It was in virtue of this
ideology that Hitler authorized the secret T- “euthanasia program”
under which between , and , mentally ill patients were
murdered in –: the personnel used and expertise acquired in
this operation were later transferred to the Operation Reinhard camps
(Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka).78 The same biological racism—a
modern ideology, not traditional anti-Semitism—motivated the murder
of the Roma and Sinti, largely through the initiative of the Criminal
Police (a separate wing of the RSHA from the Security Police) and
despite Hitler’s lack of personal interest in the “Gypsy Question.”79
But it was the Jewish “virus,” as Hitler called it, that represented the
most deadly danger to the health of the German Volk. As Paul Karl
Schmidt, press chief of the German Foreign Office, put it in :
“The Jewish question is no question of humanity and no question of
religion, but a question of political hygiene. Jewry is to be combated
wherever it is found, because it is a political infectant, the ferment of
disintegration and death of every national organism.”80 Thus when it
came to devising actual policies for the “final solution of the Jewish
question,” murder was the Nazis’ default position, set by an ideology
that identified the Jews as a deadly threat. The Holocaust was the out-
come of a bureaucratic problem-solving process over-determined by
the biological racism that constituted the ideological cement of Na-
tional Socialism.

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The primacy of Nazi ideology in the development of the Holocaust

is critical to understanding that, even if even if economic pressures—
for example, food shortages in the occupied USSR—may have helped
motivate particular murder campaigns, the extermination of the Jews
cannot be explained in economic terms. Raul Hilberg argues that “in
the preliminary phase [the isolation and expropriation of the Jews] fi-
nancial gains, public or private, far outweighed expenses, but . . . in the
killing phase receipts no longer balanced losses.”81 From the stand-
point of the war effort, the Holocaust destroyed scarce skilled work-
ers and diverted rolling stock from military purposes. Individual cap-
italist firms such as I.G. Farben undoubtedly profited from the
extermination of the Jews, but, however instrumentally rational the
bureaucratic organization of the Holocaust may have become, this
crime was dictated by considerations neither of profitability nor of
military strategy.82
Biological racism also played a crucial role in motivating the perpe-
trators. Norman Geras, as we have seen, has sought to highlight the
importance of the Nazis’ liberation of the urge to transgress. Now one
can see evidence of this, notably in the more pogrom-like massacres—
for example, during the radicalization of the murder of Lithuanian
Jews in the summer of , when the Einsatzgruppen exploited local
anti-Semitism, encouraging Lithuanian popular participation in the
killings.83 But anti-Semitism—whether in the pseudo-scientific form
it took in Nazi ideology or in a more traditional version—was re-
quired in order to transform the Jews into the objectified Other
against which these passions could legitimately be expressed.
Their commitment to Nazi ideology helped to sustain in the SS elite
the combination of callous efficiency and self-control that seems to
have been what Himmler meant by “decency” in his notorious speech
of  October  to SS Gruppenführer in Poznan, when he declared:
“Most of you know what it means when  corpses lie there, or 
lie there, or  lie there. To have gone through all this and—apart
from the exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained
decent, that has hardened us. This is a page of glory in our history
never written and never to be written.”84 As Ulrich Herbert puts it,
the intellectual anti-semitism, so to speak, is detectable, especially in the leaders of the
Security Police and the Einsatzgruppen. Here, in genocide’s hard core, enmity towards
the Jews is recognizable as a manifestation of a radical völkisch world-view . . . seeing
their own actions within the context of such a world-view not only insulated them
against interference by other agencies, it also provided that exculpatory discourse that
lessened inhibitions and offered an avenue of self-justification by representing one’s
own actions as the necessary means to a higher end, thus suspending acquired hu-
manitarian principles.85

The overdetermining role played by Nazi ideology in the Holocaust

might seem to rule out any Marxist interpretation. Such seems to be

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the implication of Herbert’s declaration:“Racism was not a ‘mistaken

belief ’ serving to conceal the true interests of the regime, which were
essentially economic. It was the fixed point of the whole system.”86
But it is a caricature of historical materialism that reduces it to the at-
tribution of economic motives to social actors.87 Marx famously
replied to an objection to his theory that “this is all very true for our
own times, in which material interests are preponderant, but not for
the Middle Ages, dominated by Catholicism, nor for Athens and
Rome dominated by politics,” by saying: “it is the manner in which
they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics,
in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part.”88 Similarly one
might say that a historical materialist account of the Holocaust must
proceed, not by denying the central role played by biological racism
in the extermination of the Holocaust, but by explaining why this
ideology assumed such centrality in National Socialism. Much of the
contemporary historiography of the Third Reich seems, in correcting
for an earlier neglect, to treat racism as a kind of brute datum that does
not itself require explanation.
Overcoming this weakness requires that we situate the Holocaust in
the larger evolution of the National Socialist regime. Here the most
important contribution has been made by Martin Broszat, who places
the radicalization of the regime, the so-called “racial revolution,” in
the context of the Nazis’ failure to reconstruct German society:
The more or less corporatist ideals of National Socialism, the pursuit of a compre-
hensive new order for agriculture . . . , the ideas for reforming the Reich and the pro-
posals for a revolutionary recasting of the army, civil service and judicature—none of
this could be achieved.The strength of the National Socialist movement was only suf-
ficient to endanger the existing state of affairs and partially to undermine it . . . But
the less chance there was of converting National Socialism’s ideological dogma to the
tasks of constructive reorganization, the more exclusively that ideological policy fo-
cused only on the negative aspects and aims which primarily affected only legal, hu-
manitarian and moral principles, but which appeared to be socially or politically
unimportant . . . But since the practical (rather than the propagandist) activity of the
ideological movement was almost exclusively geared to these negative aims, the only
conceivable further development had to be by way of a continued intensification of
the measures against the Jews, the mentally ill and anti-social elements. But discrim-
ination could not be stepped up ad infinitum. As a result the “movement” was bound
to end up by wreaking physical destruction.89
Broszat’s argument provides, in my view, the best basis on which to
understand the “cumulative radicalization” of National Socialism that
he and Hans Mommsen have highlighted. Ian Kershaw offers an al-
ternative interpretation that stresses the personal role of Hitler within
the regime. Indeed, for Kershaw, the defining characteristic of Nazism
seems be to Hitler’s unique authority, which he considers an instance
of what Max Weber called charismatic domination. The initiatives by
individual Nazi officials that played such a critical role in, for exam-

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ple, the development of the Holocaust legitimized their actions by

claiming to be (as one of them put it) “working towards the Führer”:
the justification provided by such an invocation of Hitler’s authority
helped to fuel the welter of centrifugal initiatives that drove the Nazi
regime into increasing barbarity and progressive disintegration:
Doctors rushing to nominate patients of asylums for the “euthanasia programme” in
the interests of a eugenically “healthier” people; lawyers and judges zealous to coop-
erate in the dismantling of legal safeguards in order to cleanse society of “criminal el-
ements” and undesirables; business leaders anxious to profit from preparations for war
and once in war by grabbing of booty and exploitation of foreign slave labour; thrust-
ing technocrats and scientists seeking to extend power and influence by jumping onto
the bandwagon of technological experimentation and modernization; non-Nazi mil-
itary leaders keen to build up a modern army and restore Germany’s hegemony in
central Europe; and old-fashioned conservatives with a distaste for the Nazis but an
even greater fear and dislike of the Bolsheviks: all were, through their many and var-
ied forms of collaboration, indirectly at least “working towards the Führer.” The result
was the unstoppable radicalization of the “system” and the gradual emergence of pol-
icy objectives closely related to the ideological imperatives represented by Hitler.90

This passage brings into focus the feeling that gradually develops
about the metaphor of “working towards the Führer ” while reading
Kershaw’s fine biography of Hitler—namely that a concept that
within certain narrow limits may be quite useful is being stretched to
the point of meaninglessness. There would often have been a discrep-
ancy between the actual motivations of the actors listed above and the
reasons that they gave in order to legitimize their actions within the
“public sphere” of the Third Reich. Kershaw covers himself against
this kind of objection by treating these cases as ones “where ideolog-
ical motivation was secondary, or perhaps even absent altogether, but
where the objective function of the actions was nevertheless to fur-
ther the potential for implementation of the goals which Hitler em-
bodied.”91 But what criterion is one to use in order to determine
whether particular actions had this “objective function”?
Kershaw talks of Hitler “representing” or “embodying” certain “ide-
ological imperatives,” but this simply pushes the problem back: how
are we establish what these imperatives were? To refer to Hitler’s per-
sonal goals would collapse into the kind of intentionalism that the
metaphor of “working towards the Führer” is presumably meant to
avoid. In a manner familiar to any student of Hegel, objectivism risks
sliding into its polar opposite, subjectivism. The only way to avoid this
trap is, in my view, to place at the basis of one’s interpretation of Na-
tional Socialism, not Hitler’s personal role as charismatic leader, but
rather the specific nature of Nazism as a distinctive kind of mass
movement.92
Here we return to Trotsky’s analysis of fascism. National Socialism
represented a particular response to the intense social and economic

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contradictions undergone by German society at the onset of Mayer’s

“General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the twentieth century.”While
mobilizing its followers in support of a counter-revolutionary proj-
ect—the destruction of organized labour and the rehabilitation of
German imperialism—it promised them an apparently revolutionary
vision of a Volksgemainschaft, a racial Utopia from which both class
conflict and alien races (the two united in Nazi ideology in the figure
of the Jew setting German against German) had been banished. De-
nied fulfilment in the shape of a genuine reconstruction of society
when Hitler took power, Nazi radicalism was displaced onto the Jew-
ish question. The energies of the movement could safely focus on
what Broszat calls the “negative aspects” of National Socialist ideol-
ogy—the drive to eliminate the Other. Racial policy did not threaten
the uneasy pact struck by the Nazis and big capital. Crudely put—Na-
tional Socialism failed to create the Volksgemeinschaft, but at least the
SS could exterminate the Jews.
The interpretation sketched out here dovetails in with some sug-
gestive remarks by Slavoj Žižek. He writes that “the true horror of
Nazism lies in the very way it displaced/naturalized social antagonism
into racial differences.”93 Elsewhere he argues that “‘political extrem-
ism’ or ‘excessive radicalism’ should always be read as a phenomenon
of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, as a lim-
itation, of a refusal actually to ‘go to the end.’”94 The “cumulative rad-
icalization” of the Nazi regime was thus not simply a consequence ei-
ther of its own internal fragmentation or of Hitler’s personal role. It
reflected the structural inability of National Socialism to “go to the
end”—to remove the social contradictions to which it was a response
and for which it had promised a cure.
This is one respect in which there is a connection between the
Holocaust and the capitalist mode of production. It is, of course, as I
have already noted, not the case that the extermination of the Jews can
be deduced from the economic needs of German capitalism. But Na-
tional Socialism became a mass movement during what is still the
worst economic crisis in the history of the capitalist system. More than
that—to escape from this crisis and to crush the working class, German
big business allied itself to a movement whose racist and pseudo-revo-
lutionary ideology drove it towards the Holocaust, particularly because
of its failure to transform German society. Thus—not directly, but in
this nonetheless important way—capitalism was causally implicated in
the process that led to the extermination of the Jews.95

Mechanisms and Murder

This kind of explanation, invoking as it does economic and political
structures, social classes, ideologies and mass movements, may not sat-

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isfy many seeking to make sense of the Holocaust. To return to the

beginning of this essay, Norman Geras complains of Ernest Mandel’s
structural explanation of the extermination of the Jews that it “seems
to me to fall far short of the thing it purports to address. None of
these causes speaks directly to the aim of wiping out a people.”96 Now
it is indeed true that Mandel sees “the Holocaust as the ultimate ex-
pression of the destructive tendencies existing in bourgeois society,
tendencies whose roots lie deep in colonialism and imperialism.”97 By
contrast, the interpretation I have offered here tries to fill out the
specificity that is wanting in Mandel’s account in particular by giving
what seems to me its proper weight to the dynamics of National So-
cialism as a mass movement.
But this might still not satisfy Geras. I can think of two reasons why
it mightn’t. One is that (as is all too possible) it just isn’t a very good
explanation: it fails to take into account, or lay sufficient stress on, fac-
tors crucial to a proper understanding of the Holocaust. And maybe
this failure reflects a deeper myopia inherent in Marxism as a social
theory. Perhaps this is so: whether or not it is will emerge from the
critical debate inherent in historical enquiry. There is, however, an-
other reason why the interpretation of the Holocaust set out here
might fail to satisfy Geras (or indeed anyone else). And that is just that
no explanation of the extermination of the Jews can really satisfy, not
because the explanation is necessarily false but because of the enor-
mity of the event that it seeks to make sense of. Such an inherent dis-
crepancy between cause and effect is presumably at least part of what
Hannah Arendt was trying to get at when she put forward her cele-
brated thesis of the “banality of evil.” This gap between the event of
the Holocaust and our attempts theoretically to comprehend it is the
rational kernel in the idea, articulated by Elie Wiesel among others,
that it is beyond history and understanding.
Silence is certainly one legitimate response to what happened at
Auschwitz, but, I have tried to argue, it is not enough. Theoretical
generalization is required, and not only to help capture the Holocaust
in all its specificity. For Mandel isn’t simply wrong to seek to situate
the extermination of the Jews in the context of the broader history of
capitalism as an economic and social system, even if such contextual-
ization is insufficient. Mike Davis has shown in his stunning new book
Late Victorian Holocausts how British imperial policies in India designed
to minimize government expenditure and encourage industrious
habits among the poor helped to turn the great droughts of –
and – into human catastrophes of appalling proportions: the
combined Indian death-toll from famine and disease in these two
droughts is estimated at between  and  million (many millions
more died in China and elsewhere).98
Now plainly Lord Lytton and Lord Curzon—respectively the

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British viceroys of India during these two droughts—and the Home

governments they served aren’t the same as Himmler and Heydrich.
The deliberate intention to exterminate millions was missing in their
case.99 But are we to conclude that those who pursued policies that in
their own way were as callous and ideological as the Nazis’, even
though the inspiration came from Smith, Malthus, and Spencer rather
than from the strange brew concocted by Hitler, and whose conse-
quence was the avoidable death of millions belong to a completely
different moral universe from the racist bureaucrats of the RSHA?
Consider, for example, these words of the highly respectable Oxford
philosopher Hastings Rashdall, published in :
I will now mention a case in which probably no one will hesitate. It is becoming tol-
erably obvious at the present day that all improvement in the social condition of the
higher races of mankind postulates the exclusion of competition with the lower races.
This means that, sooner or later, the lower Well-being—it may be ultimately the very
existence—of countless Chinamen or negroes must be sacrificed that a higher life
may be possible for a much smaller of white men.100

Such comparisons introduce a further complication. For Davis argues

that the disasters he chronicles did not simply result from the malign
interaction of weather systems with imperial policy and liberal ideol-
ogy, but also reflected the transformation of hitherto prosperous re-
gions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into “famished peripheries of
a London-centred world economy.”101 The subordination of small-
holding peasantries to the rhythms of a world market beyond their
comprehension or control, and the indebtedness of their rulers to Eu-
ropean and American banks increased the vulnerability of entire soci-
eties to extreme weather events. Here tracing the thread of responsi-
bility becomes even more complicated. Once again, there is plainly no
will to exterminate on the part of bankers and brokers, but all the
same their decisions may have played a critical role in outcomes that
destroyed entire communities thousands of miles away.
So how then are we morally to judge actors who enjoy a privileged
role in impersonal economic mechanisms that have devastating con-
sequences for others? This is, of course, not simply a historical ques-
tion. We live at a time when the ideology of laissez faire that legit-
imized Victorian indifference to Indian starvation has enjoyed a
comeback in the shape of the neo-liberal “Washington consensus” that
now rules Western finance ministries and multilateral bodies such as
the IMF and WTO. Ken Livingstone caused much indignation when,
during last year’s mayoral elections in London, he said that capitalism
kills more people every year than Hitler did.102 But a much more
sober figure, the sceptical liberal historian Peter Novick has pointed
out the “curious anomaly” that, amidst more and more elaborate
Holocaust commemorations, between  and  million children die

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each year because “they lack the food and minimal medical facilities
that would keep them alive,” a cause that it is well within human
power to remove.103
The point of these comparisons is not to relativize the Holocaust
out of existence, or to deny the historical specificity of the extermi-
nation of the Jews. Much of this essay has, after all, been devoted to
addressing this specificity. The point is rather that avoidable, socially
caused mass death is a chronic feature of the modern world. The mix
of causes of these mass deaths—economic structures, bureaucratic
callousness, collective ideologies, deliberate policy, and emotions as
diverse as hatred, greed, fear, indifference, and the enjoyment of a
perverted liberation—varies from case to case. If the Holocaust repre-
sents one extreme—that of deliberate, industrialized mass murder,
contemporary child mortality represents another—that of impersonal
structural causation.104 But both are avoidable, and both arose within
modern capitalism. Studying the extermination of the Jews is impor-
tant. We need to remember the victims and to remain alert against
movements reviving the obscene ideology of National Socialism. But
understanding the Holocaust can also help to prevent the mass mur-
ders that are happening now, and stop us from being mere bystanders.

Notes
1 This text provided the basis of my inaugural lecture at the University of York on  March
. The interpretation it offers was originally given in a talk at Marxism  (organized
by the Socialist Workers Party in London in July ). I am grateful to Tom Baldwin,
Norman Geras, Donny Gluckstein, and Julie Waterson for their comments. I should also
acknowledge two debts that date back to the s, to the late Tim Mason, for his per-
sonal kindness and the intellectual inspiration he offered, and to Colin Sparks for the
informal tutorials he gave me (amidst much friendly raillery) in the Marxist theory of
fascism.
2 K. Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), .
 N. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso, ), .
 P. Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, ), –, n. .
 The problem of comparison was effectively dealt with by some of the saner contributions
to the German Historikerstreit of the s: see especially H. Mommsen, “The New His-
torical Consciousness and the Relativizing of National Socialism,” in Forever in the Shadow
of Hitler? (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, ).
 Novick., Holocaust and Collective Memory, .
 W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), I. .
 See, for example, S. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, ), and N. Geras, “Life Was Beautiful Even There,” Imprints 
().
 N. Geras, “Marxists before the Holocaust,” in id., The Contract of Mutual Indifference (Lon-
don: Verso, ), –. On Mandel’s wartime brush with death see “The Luck of a
Crazy Youth,” in G. Achcar, ed., The Legacy of Ernest Mandel (London: Verso, ), where
Geras’s piece also appears.
 E. Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, ), –. See also id.,
“Material, Social and Ideological Preconditions for the Nazi Genocide,” in Achcar, ed.,
Legacy of Ernest Mandel.

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 Geras,“Marxists before the Holocaust,” .

 M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: NLB, ),
–. Enzo Traverso documents an even more extreme failure to register the Holo-
caust in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: see his “The Blindness of the Intellectuals” in id., Un-
derstanding the Nazi Genocide (London: Pluto, ).
 E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, ), –, and ch. . A con-
trasting focus on the fascist challenge to liberal democracy is the main strength of Mark
Mazower’s otherwise disappointing history of th century Europe, Dark Continent (Lon-
don: Allen Lane, ).
 Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide, .
 Novick, Holocaust and Collective Memory, esp. chs. –.
 In particular Finkelstein’s cavalier dismissal of the political threat represented by Holocaust
denial and by the far right—as when he declares that “there is no evidence that Holocaust
deniers exert any more influence in the United States than the flat earth society does”
(Holocaust Industry, )—seems to me very seriously mistaken.
 T.W. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, ), , from his posthu-
mously published Epilogue to a book that first appeared in German in .
 Ibid., .
 See especially the research summarized in the contributions to U. Herbert, ed., National
Socialist Extermination Policies (New York: Berghahn, ).
 L.D. Trotsky, 1905 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), –.
 Geras,“Marxists before the Holocaust,” .
 Ibid., –.
 Ibid., , , . For a sample of such descriptions, see the repellent narratives assembled
in E. Klee et al., “The Good Old Days”:The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders
(New York: Konecky & Konecky, ).
 N. Geras,“Socialist Hope in the Shadow of Catastrophe,” in Contract of Mutual Indifference.
 S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, ), .
 Similar considerations would apply to other attempts to explain the Holocaust directly
from what are held to be universal characteristics of human nature—for example, the need
for identity that, according to G.A. Cohen, underlies the varieties of national, ethnic, reli-
gious, and racial identifications: see id.,“Reconsidering Historical Materialism,” in A. Cal-
linicos, ed., Marxist Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
 Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide, .
 J. Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power (London: Gollancz, ), ; G. Dimitrov, Re-
port to the Seventh Congress Communist International 1935: For the Unity of the Working Class
against Fascism (London: Red Star Press, ), . Extensive critical discussion of the
Comintern’s analysis of fascism will be found in N. Poulantzas, Fascisme et dictature (Paris:
Seuil, ).
 I appreciate that use of “fascism” as a generic term for a particular type of movement and
regime rather than specifically to refer to the Italian case is now regarded as vieux jeu by
historians. I have found nevertheless this usage unavoidable—first, because I am discussing
Marxist theories of fascism conceived in this broad sense, and, secondly, because I regard
the refusal in principle to engage in comparative analysis designed to illuminate the simi-
larities and differences that connect not merely German National Socialism and Italian
Fascism but also more recent far-right movements to be the worst sort of historical ob-
scurantism. For a discussion of “the disappearance of theories, or articulated concepts, of
fascism from research and writing about the Third Reich,” see T.W. Mason, “Whatever
Happened to ‘Fascism’?” in id., Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (ed. J. Kaplan; Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ): quotation from .
 A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, ). Restricted to the
German case, Mayer’s thesis amounts to a version of the idea, widely influential among
West German left-liberal historians, of the Sonderweg. This interpretation of German his-
tory (at least prior to ) having followed a “special path” reflecting the dominance of
pre-modern agrarian elites has, in my view, found its definitive refutation: see D. Black-
bourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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). See, for an alternative account of late th century Europe, E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age
of Empire 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ).
 Id., Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York: Pantheon, ), , , , . Mayer’s
detailed account of the Holocaust will be found in ibid., Part Three.
 See, for example, C.R. Browning, “The Holocaust as By-product?” in id., The Path to
Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
 I. Kershaw, Hitler (London: Allen Lane, –), II. –.
 W. Manoschek, “The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia,” in Herbert, ed., National So-
cialist Extermination Policies. See more generally O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ).
 See, for example, A.J. Mayer, The Furies:Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revo-
lutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
 The aristocratic monde involved in the plot to kill Hitler is well evoked in some of the
memoir literature: see, for example, C. Bielenberg, The Past is Myself (London: Corgi, )
and The Berlin Diaries 1940–1945 of Marie ‘Missie’Vassiltichikov (London: Methuen, ).
 J. Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death (New York: Henry Holt, ), .
 See, for example, D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ) and,
for a general survey of the literature, M. Nolan, “Work, Gender, and Everyday Life: Re-
flections on Continuity, Normality and Agency in Twentieth-Century Germany,” in I.
Kershaw and M. Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ).
 Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, .
 Ironically enough in the light of his later evolution, this characterization of National So-
cialism is very close to Ernst Nolte’s definition of fascism as “revolutionary reaction”: see
Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Mentor, ).
 L. D. Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (New York; Pathfinder, ), .
 Poulantzas, Fascisme et dictature, –.
 Trotsky, Struggle against Fascism, .
 Ibid., .
 See the careful analysis of the evidence in D. Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the
Working Class (London: Bookmarks, ), ch. , and Ian Kershaw’s summary of the state
of popular opinion on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power: Hitler, I. –.
 D. Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad, ), .
 Despite the immense value of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler as a compellingly written and scholarly
synthesis of a vast literature, Fest’s older biography (perhaps because his conservatism at-
tunes him more to the nuances of German cultural life) paints a more convincing portrait
of Hitler as a racial revolutionary who, when his Machiavellian engagement with the re-
alities of power finally failed at Stalingrad, relapsed into the Utopianism of the pre-
period, embracing what Fest calls “the strategy of a flamboyant downfall,” Hitler (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, ), . See also, for example, ibid., –.
 Trotsky, Struggle against Fascism, , , , . When Donny Gluckstein approvingly
cites the last two sentences quoted he is, I think, mistaken, even though I agree with the
argument that surrounds this quotation: Gluckstein, Nazis, Capitalism, and the Working
Class, .
 Poulantzas, Fascisme et dictature, Pt. , ch. IV.
 Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death, .
 In my view this is also the best way of conceptualizing the relationship between the state
and capital as such: see R. Miliband,“State Power and Class Interests,” New Left Review 
() and C. Harman,“The State and Capitalism Today,” International Socialism . ().
The analysis put forward by Henry Ashby Turner in German Big Business and the Rise of
Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), though offered as a refutation of Marxist
accounts of Nazism, therefore actually provides detailed support for the interpretation de-
veloped here.
 D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), –, –.
 Kershaw, Hitler, I..
 Ibid., I.; see generally ibid., I, chs.  and .

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 See ibid., II, ch. .

 For a lucid summary of the issues, see O. Bartov, “From Blitzkrieg to Total War,” in Ker-
shaw and Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism, –.
 T.W. Mason,“The Primacy of Politics,” in id., Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, –.
 R. Overy, Goering (London: RKP, ), esp. chs. –; quotation from .
 For a comparatively sophisticated version of stamokap theory see P. Boccara, Etudes sur le
capitalisme monopoliste d’Etat, sa crise et son issue (Paris: Editions Sociales, ). For critiques,
see N. Poulantzas, Les Classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourdhui (Paris: Seuil, ) and B.
Jessop, The Capitalist State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, ).
 For a very similar analysis to that put forward in this and the preceding paragraph, see
Gluckstein, Nazism, Capitalism and the Working Class, ch. .
 See T. Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (rev. edn., London: Bookmarks, ), and C. Har-
man, Explaining the Crisis (London: Bookmarks, ), ch. .
 For a pioneering Marxist study that offers a differentiated account of German capitalist in-
terests particularly in Hitler’s programme of territorial conquest, see A. Sohn-Rethel, The
Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism (London: Free Association Books, ).
 Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, . At most, Peukert argues, by undermining traditional in-
stitutions and beliefs, National Socialism contributed towards the emergence of a more in-
dividualized and privatized society that blossomed fully during the West German
Wirtschaftswunder of the s: see esp. ibid., ch. . For a thorough critique of the idea that
Hitler presided over a “social revolution,” see Gluckstein, Nazis, Capitalism and the Working
Class, ch. .
 Mason, Social Policy, passim. Working-class resistance was, however, much weaker during
the war itself. Involved in this shift were the divisive effects of the presence in Germany
of (by August ) over seven and a half million foreign slave labourers: as a result, Ul-
rich Herbert writes, “the practice of racism became a daily habit, part of everyday life,
without individual Germans having to participate in active discrimination or oppression,”
Hitler’s Foreign Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
 Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, .
 See H. Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head (London: Secker & Warburg, ).
 See, for an overview of this debate, see T.W. Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A Cur-
rent Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism,” in id., Nazism, Fascism
and the Working Class.
 Kershaw, Hitler, II. . See ibid., II. –, on Hitler’s awareness of (but refusal explicitly
to acknowledge) the extermination of the Jews.
 H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Cambridge: Polity, ), ; see esp. id., “The
Realization of the Unthinkable,” in ibid., and M. Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis of the
‘Final Solution,’” in H. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (Houndmills: Macmillan, ).
 C. Gerlach,“German Economic Interests, Occupation Policy, and the Murder of the Jews
of Belorussia, –,” in Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies, –.
 C. Dieckmann, “The War and The Killing of the Lithuanian Jews,” in Herbert, ed., Na-
tional Socialist Extermination Policies.
 G. Aly, “Final Solution” (London: Arnold, ), . Aly’s earlier work with Susanne Heim
on Nazi population policy has provoked much controversy: see, for example, C. Brown-
ing,“German Technocrats, Jewish Labour, and the Final Solution,” in id., Path to Genocide.
Browning’s criticisms do not, however, seem to apply to this book.
 The attitude of Nazi officials towards what they defined as administrative problems was al-
ways permeated by racism. Ulrich Herbert argues that the occupation authorities in
Poland consciously adopted unworkable Jewish policies such as ghettoization in order “to
pressurize the authorities in Berlin to find a final, radical solution,”“Labour and Extermi-
nation: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism,” Past
& Present  (), .
 Aly, “Final Solution”, chs. – (quotation from ), and “‘Jewish Resettlement’: Reflec-
tions on the Political Prehistory of the Holocaust,” in Herbert, ed., National Socialist Ex-
termination Policies. There is considerable controversy among historians over both the pre-
cise timing of the decision to murder the Jews and whether it was taken, as Aly argues, as

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a result of frustrated expectations of victory, or in the euphoria occasioned by early Ger-

man military successes against the Red Army. For an influential statement of the latter
view, see C.R. Browning, Fateful Months (New York: Holmes & Meier, ) and “Hitler
and the Euphoria of Victory,” in D. Cesarini, ed., The Final Solution: Origins and Implemen-
tation (London: RKP, ).
 See Robert Jan van Pelt’s and Debórah Dwork’s compelling study, Auschwitz 1270 to the
Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).
 Aly,“Final Solution,” .
 Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), .
 See, for example, H. Friedlander,“Euthanasia and the Final Solution,” in Cesarani, ed., Fi-
nal Solution, id., The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, ), and Kershaw, Hitler, II. –. Aly stresses the role of “pragmatic goals”—
clearing hospital space, saving money, etc., in T-, but he acknowledges that “[i]deology
did, however, remain important in so far as it sufficiently undermined the moral and legal
barriers in the minds of the perpetrators,” “Final Solution,” .
 M. Zimmermann,“The National Socialist ‘Solution of The Gypsy Question,’” in Herbert,
ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies. The centrality of racism to the National So-
cialist regime is systematically developed in M. Burleigh and W. Wipperman, The Racial
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The modernity of National Social-
ism is one of the main themes of Peukert’s Inside Nazi Germany.
 R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (rev. edn.,  vols., New York: Holmes &
Meier, ), II. .
 Ibid., III. . As an example of the role played by economic factors in specific cases
Christian Gerlach argues:“The various liquidation programmes in Belorussia, particularly
those against non-Jewish population groups, were in large part responses to pressures re-
lated to food economics,”“German Economic Interests,” .
 It is a weakness of Donny Gluckstein’s generally excellent account of National Socialism
that he tends to relax the tension between ideology and economics in the Holocaust: see
The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class, –. Nevertheless, even during the last
phases of the war, Hitler’s opportunism could still override ideological considerations: in
April , long after the Reich had been made judenfrei, he authorized the deployment
of over , Hungarian Jews to work in the German arms industry: Herbert,“Labour
and Extermination,” –.
 D. Porat,“The Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Cesarini, ed., Final Solution.
 Hilberg, Destruction, III. . See also on perpetrators’ motivations, ibid., III. –, and
Christopher Browning’s outstanding study, Ordinary Men (New York: HarperPerennial,
).
 U. Herbert,“Extermination Policy,” in id., ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies, .
 Id.,“Labour and Extermination,” .
 For a recent example of this error see N. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus (London: Allen Lane,
), Introduction.
 Marx, Capital, I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ),  n. . See L. Althusser and E. Bal-
ibar, Reading Capital (London: NLB, ), –.
 M. Broszat, The Hitler State (London: Longman, ), , .
 I. Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the Führer,’” in Kershaw and Lewin, eds., Stalinism and
Nazism, .
 Ibid., .
 See, for further discussion of these issues with respect to the second volume of Kershaw’s
Hitler biography, A. Callinicos, “Just a Case of Bad Intentions?” Socialist Review (Novem-
ber ).
 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, .
 Id.,“Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” in J. Butler et al., Contingency, Hegem-
ony, Universality (London: Verso, ),  n. .
 This indirect connection was well expressed by Joel Geier, speaking at Marxism :
“German capitalism didn’t need the Holocaust. But it needed the Nazis, and they needed
the Holocaust.”

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 Geras,“Marxists before the Holocaust,”  n. .

 Mandel,“Material, Social and Ideological Preconditions,” .
 M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, ).
 Indeed, David Goodhart, Curzon’s latest biographer and an admirer of the British Raj,
praises “[t]he energy and thoroughness with which Curzon handled the famine crisis,”
Curzon (London: Macmillan, ), .
 Quoted in Jeremy Waldron, “Two Essays on Basic Equality” (), , available at
www.law.nyu.edu. I am grateful to Chris Betram for this reference.
 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, .
 See, for example, R. Bennett, “Livingstone Defiant over Hitler Claims,” Financial Times,
 April .
 Novick, Holocaust and Collective Memory, .
 The mass murders perpetrated by the Stalinist regime in the USSR during the s rep-
resent an intermediate case, since they combined the deliberate elimination of perhaps
two million real or imagined political enemies with millions more deaths caused mainly
by the pursuit of policies that did not aim at this outcome though it was their predictable
consequence. See E. Traverso, “The Uniqueness of Auschwitz,” in id., Understanding the
Nazi Genocide, and, for a recent study of the Stalinist Terror that draws on new evidence,
J.A. Getty and O.V. Naumov, The Road to Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press,
).

 t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m