By John Whittaker
Michael Berenbaum shared his knowledge of the Holocaust with nearly 1,000
people Thursday at Chautauqua Institution as the lecture series, “God,
Human Nature and The Insights of Science” continued.
Berenbaum, president and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation, has written 12 books and numerous articles about the Holocaust.
He also provided basic information for the 1994 HBO movie Conspiracy, a 94-minute
film about a 94-minute meeting, which resulted in the order to commit genocide
against the Jews.
In his hour-long lecture the professor examined the structure of the Holocaust
and the actions of two principals-Adolph Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
Berenbaum said the Holocaust was less an act of barbaric anger than a case
of modernism coupled with the absence of commonly held values regarding human
life.
“The key to understanding it is not as a resort to medievalism but as
an expression of the dark side of modernization,” he said. “An
expression of the fascination with the unlimited power that the empowered
person enjoys. It was unlimited power unconstrained by basic values, unlimited
power facilitated by a government that is consummated with the expression
of unlimited power.”
He said there are five key events of the Holocaust which are important in
order to understand its structure: the definition of the Jews by the religion
of their grandparents; the expropriation, or separation, of the Jews by stripping
them of their civil rights; the concentration of Jews accomplished by the
stigma of being labeled a Jew; mobile killing units which went from town to
town to kill Jews; and the death camps.
Rather than rely solely on the 52,000 survivors’ accounts of the Holocaust,
Berenbaum said it is necessary to get the soldiers’ point of view.
He said Adolph Eichmann, a famous war criminal, left two main sources of information-a
lengthy interrogation record when he was arrested in Israel and his personal
diary-which give insight into his thoughts.
Throughout the Nuremberg trial, Eichmann protested his innocence by saying
he was simply acting under orders given by his superiors.
While he admitted not objecting to the death camps, he said he was just staying
faithful to the oath he took when he joined the SS. Berenbaum read a passage
from Eichmann’s interrogation that gave insight into Eichmann’s
thought process.
“ ‘I’m guilty because I helped with the evacuation’
(taking bodies out of the camps),” Berenbaum read. “ ‘I’m
guilty of complicity, but not of murder.’ He showed some compassion
for his own psyche by not drawing too close to the killing process. My job,
he said, is to obey and to comply.”
Another well-known figure was Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Prior to the concentration
camps, he conducted experiments on children, mentally retarded, emotionally
distressed and anyone else who didn’t fit into the idea of the “master
race.”
Though he knew what he was doing could mean the death penalty before an international
tribunal, he attempted to flee Germany with documentation of his experiments.
“His dream was of the improvement of the human species, the dominance
of the master race could be improved by what he called applied biology,”
Berenbaum said. “Nazism attracted such men, it cultivated and promoted
such science. It gave them the opportunity to practice such medicine uninhibited
by the normal constraints of accepted medical science.”
According to Berenbaum, only when all of the above factors are considered
together can the Holocaust be completely understood.
“All of this becomes essential to understanding the perpetration of
the deed,” he said. “It has become, for our world, the negative
absolute, the ultimate manifestation of evil and rightfully so. The more you
look into this evil, the more you see its modernity, and the more you see
its totality.”