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Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol.12, No. 2, 199.5

The Holocaust: Moral and Political Lessons

A. H. LESSER

ABSTRACT: I n many discussions, whether general or academic, the Holocaust is used as a warning of how initially small corruptions can lead to terrible consequences. In particular, it has been seen as illustrating the ‘slippery slope’ from euthanasia to murder, as showing the consequences of an exaggerated respect for law, and as showing the effects of a corrupt ideology. I t is argued that these three points are all somewhat inaccurate, and that I ) the ‘slippery slope’ occurred much earlier, the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme being already murder; 2 ) it was power rather than law that was excessively respected; and 3 ) it was the corruption of the sense of moral responsibility that did the real harm, rather than the establishment of any coherent ideology.

It is entirely right that so terrible an event as the Holocaust should be referred to in moral and political discussions, whether practical or theoretical - always provided the references do not trivialise the event by inappropriate comparisons, such as the use of ‘genocide’ in contexts where, though a group may be discriminated against, no member is threatened with death, let alone the whole group. But the exact nature of the lessons to be learned is still unclear. In this paper, I want to consider three ‘uses’ to which this event has been put, and to try to show that all three are at least partly incorrect and require some modification.

The first is the use of references to the Holocaust in ‘slippery slope’ or ‘thin end of the wedge’ arguments. I want to consider three such arguments, involving euthanasia, moral ‘softening up’ by propaganda, and the implementation of the policy of extermination. Roughly, one may say that the first argument is misplaced, the second may well be correct, and the third is almost certainly correct.

As regards euthanasia, it is argued that the Nazi mass killing began precisely with the euthanasia of the physically and mentally unfit, and developed from this to the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Hence, the argument continues, to legalise euthanasia, even voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, is the ‘thin end of the wedge’ and likely, at least, to lead eventually to murder by another name. But this ignores the fact that the so- called ‘euthanasia’ was itself simply murder, and never anything else. It was not asked for by the victims; it was not restricted to the terminally ill; and, even officially, it was motivated not by any desire to relieve suffering, but by a desire to get rid of people considered to be of no social use. It was ‘euthanasia’ only in the sense that, once the decision was taken to murder these people, a relatively ‘humane’ method - gassing - was employed (the gas chambers in one hospital have been preserved as a memorial). But no one has ever yet suggested that murder ‘humanely’ carried out is any the less murder.

It may or may not be true that to legalise euthanasia, even when it is repeatedly asked for by a terminally ill patient whose suffering cannot be relieved (which is what advocates of legalised euthansia typically propose), would be the ‘thin end of the wedge’. But certainly

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the Nazi programme has no relevance either way: the Nazis did not go down a slippery slope, but began at the bottom of the slope. To claim anything else would lead to the monstrous conclusion that murder of the handicapped is less bad than the murder of Jews or Gypsies.

However, a ‘slippery slope’ of a rather different type was perhaps involved in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, one concerning the use of language and of propaganda. There is evidence that the ideas that society ought to be ‘improved’ and strengthened by the painless removal of the ‘unfit’ and ‘useless’, and that the duty of a doctor was to the welfare of society rather than that of their patient, were very much around in Germany before the Nazi Era. One should also note the linguistic sleight-of-hand involved in the euphemism ‘euthanasia’, and in classing killing by gas as medical: ‘killing, too, is a medical matter’ said Eichmann’s counsel Dr Servatius [ 11.

One may compare the stages of the Nazi treatment of Jews - roughly, anti-Jewish propaganda; segregation and discrimination; organised violence; arrest, deportation and imprisonment; and, finally, mass murder. There is a major question how far each stage led to the next (with over-lapping, of course), and in particular how far the propaganda and the isolation successfully did the work of making the Jews in the public mind less than human, and thereby reducing the likelihood of protest as the treatment grew worse.

The process is something like this. It begins with a true suggestion: society must be protected from its enemies. This is followed by a lie: the Jews/the unfit are enemies of society, or at least dangerous to it. The lie is acted on: segregation and discrimination take place. Finally, ill-treatment and murder of the groups in question become a standard practice, that ceases to require a justification. Each stage has made the next one easier.

However, though society went from bad to worse, there is evidence that its leaders did not, but rather that they had decided to ‘do their worst’ already, and put their plans into practice by stages only as a political technique. Given this, and given also that it is uncertain just how important the ‘softening up’ by propaganda really was, and also what role was played by, for example, a long tradition in Germany of both popular and intellectual anti- semitism, one may suggest the following. There may well be moral ‘slippery slopes’, and the development of racism from prejudice to propaganda to discrimination to violence may well be one example. But what is most striking with regard to the Holocaust, and perhaps to Hitler’s policies in general, is the political ‘slippery slope’.

Any political regime nearly always has to introduce a morally dubious programme in stages, first, because the physical and administrative arrangements need to be put in place before people realise what is going to happen, and, secondly, in order to see how much protest or resistance there is going to be. And what is remarkable - one says this with hindsight - is how little resistance or protest there was in the early stages, and often in the latter ones. Where there was such resistance it was often successful: the Dutch successfully resisted the policy of murdering the ‘unfit’ in the Netherlands, and the Danes both resisted the early stages of anti-Jewish legislation and helped nearly all their Jews to escape either to Sweden or into hiding. It would be silly to pretend that even early resistance would necessarily have been successful everywhere; but, again with hindsight, one can see that it would have stood a better chance than any resistance or protest later on.

My tentative conclusions are these. There is no evidence from the Nazi era to support the rejection of what in itself is desirable because of what it might lead to. There is some evidence that what is undesirable but in itself trivial, such as vague race prejudice, is in the long term much more dangerous than it seems, because of what it leads to: the problem here

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The Holocaust: moral and political lessons 145

is to know exactly what leads to what. And there is a lot of evidence that governments are likely to follow small moves in a particular direction with larger ones, and that failure to fight, in the appropriate way, early on, may lead either to a much harder fight or to the discovery that it is too late to resist at all.

The second concern of this paper is with civil disobedience. The reasons why so few people resisted the Nazis are obviously many and various. Many, no doubt, were justifiably afraid; some were no doubt malicious, or benefiting, psychologically or physically, too much to want to quarrel with the regime; some, as indicated above, probably realised the need to resist only when it was too late. But it is often suggested that another reason was a particularly German concern with legality and a belief that whatever the law commanded was morally right, so that to obey orders could not be wrong. Sometimes it is further suggested that this was supported by the philosophy of legal positivism, with its insistence that the validity of law is provided by its source and not its moral content, so that disobedience to the law on moral grounds cannot be justified.

This is both true and misleading. It is true that the Nazi era demonstrates unmistakeably that there is sometimes a moral duty to disobey those in power, even when their orders have the force of law: the history of many, maybe most or all, other countries has periods and incidents from which one could draw the same conclusion. (I am using ‘demonstrates’ in a loose sense, here, assuming it to be obvious that if what the law requires is sufficiently horrible it cannot be right to obey it.) Whether to do this one needs to adopt some form of Natural Law theory, and regard it as possible for injustice to make a law invalid, or whether, as some people think, this conclusion can be accommodated within a positivist theory, such as Hart’s, which distinguishes the two questions of validity and whether the law should morally be obeyed, is a complicated question. But certainly, the position that the law should always be obeyed is politically and morally untenable.

Now it may well be that one reason that people obeyed the Nazi leaders was out of a misguided concern for the law. But this concern, it is very important to note, was by no means shared by the leaders themselves or by many of their followers. Nazi rhetoric expressed a contempt for the rules and procedures of law and exalted the national will over the written law. What had to be obeyed was not the law but the orders of the Fuehrer, even if they were only oral. Eichmann declared at his trial that ‘the Fuehrer’s words had the force of law’; and Arendt explains that ‘whole libraries of very “learned” juridical comment have been written, all demonstrating that the Fuehrer’s words, his oral pronouncements, were the basic law of the land’, and also that ‘the oath taken by the members of the S.S. differed from the military oath sworn by the soldiers in that it bound them only to Hitler, not to Germany’ PI.

This, though, is very different from law as universally understood. For it is of the essence of law that it derives its authority not simply from which person or group makes it, but from how it is made. In any society law, even if not written down, must be made public, and must follow recognised procedures (e.g., in the U.K., being passed by both Houses of Parliament and receiving royal assent), in order to be valid. To decide that any instruction from a particular source has ‘the force of law’ is in reality to abandon law and adopt instead obedience to the will of one person, i.e. lawlessness - the very thing law is designed to prevent.

Moreover, not only did the ultimate authority become the Fuehrer’s will rather than the law, so that the final justification became simply obedience to those in power: it is perhaps worth noting that in German Macht means both power and authority, and the distinction is


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therefore that much harder to make. Also, there was a general contempt for legal procedure, expressed in a number of ways. There was the ‘kangaroo’ justice administered outside the legal system by the ‘People’s Courts’. There was the pressure on both civil and military courts to return the ‘appropriate’ verdicts and hand down the ‘appropriate’ sentences, a pressure sufficiently threatening for some judges not to be prosecuted after the Second World War because they could have successfully pleaded duress. There was the use of retro-active ‘legal’ pronouncements, whereby, for example, murder could be ‘converted’ after the event into ‘execution’. There was the regular handing down of the maximum sentence even for minor breaches of a statute. And there was the twisting of the words of statutes: for example, the statute forbidding the uttering of words ‘inimical to the Reich’ in public was regularly so interpreted as to define ‘public’ as ‘to one other person’, even one’s spouse. As the contemporary English satire, Adolfin Blunderland, put it:

‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be juror’, remarked the dear Fuehrer: ‘I’ll award me your gold and condemn you to death.’

This disregard for law is a regular feature of totalitarian and tyrannical regimes, and with good reason. For any regime whose first aim is the triumph of a particular group, or a particular ideology, rather than the maintenance of justice, law is necessarily an obstacle to its aims. To see this, consider the ideal of the rule of law, and some of its features. The ideal of the rule of law is that of a society in which everyone knows what they are required to do or refrain from doing, and knows also that if they obey the law they will be unmolested: the law will protect them from their fellow-citizens, and the police will leave those who are law- abiding alone. (This is of course an ideal: actual societies may or may not come close to it.) Features of the rule of law are a well-defined legislative procedure, which makes it absolutely clear what is law and what is not; publicising of the law; scrupulous fairness in determining whether some-one has broken the law or not, so that there are no biased judges, lying policemen or torturers extracting confessions; proportion of punishment to the seriousness of the crime; and in general what Fuller, in The Morality o f l a w , described as conformity between what the rules say and what policemen and other officials actually do [3]. (It is possible to have a very liberal constitution and very illiberal practice, as in the old Soviet Union, or, for Black people, in the American South - though here there were discriminatory laws as well.)

Now all this does not make totalitarianism impossible, because it is in theory compatible with laws of any sort, however oppressive: in theory, one could always have highly oppressive and unjust laws administered with absolute procedural fairness. But any totalitarian regime is going in practice to find the rule of law a serious obstacle. First of all, even if it controls the legislative process, it will still have to submit to the comparatively slow operation of formal procedures, instead of issuing instructions which will be immediately obeyed. Secondly, since the law is well-known, it will always be possible to devise legal methods of opposition, given time and ingenuity, and the limits of possible governmental foresight. Thirdly, provided such opposition remains within the law, no one who takes part in it will have anything to fear. Fourthly, even where the law has been broken, it will take time to arrest the people who have violated it, interrogate them fairly, prepare a case against them, and conduct a fair trial; and there is always the risk that in the end the case cannot be proved against them. Finally, even if convicted, they can still be punished only within reasonable limits, and cannot be simply ‘disposed of .



Contrast all this with the power available to a regime that is at the other end of the spectrum, and simply ignores ‘the rule of law’. Decrees can be introduced with the minimum of delay. A useful atmosphere of fear can be maintained, because people are not quite sure what is legal and what is not. Anyone who has caused any kind of trouble can be arrested; a conviction can always be obtained by one means or another; and the punishment can always be either indefinite imprisonment or death - alternatively, if there are problems with this, the person can be detained indefinitely without being brought to trial. Given all this, one can well see why the combination of totalitarian aims and respect for legal procedure, though theoretically consistent, does not happen in practice! Indeed, though the introduction of unjust statutes, such as the one confiscating Jewish property (actually struck down by the German courts after the Second World War, and declared invalid as contravening natural law), was certainly one method used by the Nazi regime to win total control and to enforce anti-Semitism and other racist and inhumane policies, more important was the corruption of the actual procedures and methods used by the police and the courts, both with regard to the conduct of arrest, interrogation and trial and with regard to the official encouragement of, for example, ‘spontaneous’ anti- Jewish violence.

Hence, my conclusion would be as follows. Certainly, the Nazi era, like many others, demonstrates that we must recognise that there can be an overriding moral duty to disobey the law, in the name of justice and humanity. But it also demonstrates the equally important need to distinguish between the law and the wishes of those in power; and to realise to what extent fair and neutral legal procedures to which by and large officials adhere can be a protection against racisim and totalitarianism. The creation and preservation of these procedures is not enough, because they cannot in themselves prevent the passing of racist or in general unjust legislation; but it is if anything more important than civil disobedience in resisting tyranny. Hence to see the Nazi era as characterised by excessive respect for law is to make a serious and dangerous error: what characterised it was rather an excessive respect for those in power.

The third issue I want to consider is rather more abstract. This is the use in ethical theory of the idea of the ‘sincere’ Nazis. It is held to be at least possible that in the Nazi party or among its supporters there were those who genuinely believed that it was their moral duty to exterminate the ‘unfit’, Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. It is then held that this ‘moral’ position is a logically consistent one, and cannot be proved to be wrong: one can say only that emotionally one finds it horrible. This leads to the conclusion that morality must be based on emotion rather than reason, that the limits on what is morally acceptable are psychological rather than rational (though none the worse for that), and that Nazi supporters did not lose their moral sense, but allowed Nazi ideology and propaganda to corrupt it emotionally.

But is the sincere Nazi a possibility? First, one should note all the non-moral reasons people had for supporting the Nazis. Many people had a lot to gain, or thought they had - political power and privilege, on a large or small scale; escape from unemployment; the defeat of the Communist party, at one point the main political alternative to Nazism. There were also big psychological gains - comradeship, the sense of being part of a great irresistible mass movement, the sense of power, and no doubt the sheer enjoyment of brutality and domination. On the other hand, there must also have been, with very good reason, sheer terror: opposition was, after all, extremely dangerous.

Between the people who had much to gain from supporting the Nazis and the people who were afraid not to support them was, presumably, a third group, those who obeyed orders, got on with their own job, and minded their own business. Were these people acting


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morally, according to their lights, and did at least some of them believe that it was their moral duty to obey orders, whatever they were? Or should one see this stance as a refusal to be moral, implying a belief that the only moral responsibility was incurred by the man who gave the orders, and the person carrying them out simply did not have to take a moral position one way or the other?

Certainly some Nazis, including highly placed ones, appear to have simply abrogated moral responsibility. Eichmann, despite declaring during the police examination that ‘he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts’, explained at his trial that ‘from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles . . . and that he had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer was “master of his own deeds’” [4]. Jodl declared that it was ‘not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in heaven’ [5]. Further support for this has been provided by one of the interrogators of those charged with war crimes, who reported that they acted much like ordinary criminals: their first line of defence was that the atrocities of which they were accused had not happened, their second line that someone else was responsible, and obedience to orders was put up as a third line of defence when the other two had failed. This does not suggest that it was sincerely seen as a moral justification; and it is worth noting that German law did not regard obedience to orders, even by a soldier, as a defence unless duress was involved as well. It is true that one characteristic of the guards and staff at Belsen, reported by the camp’s liberators, was their smugness; but again, ordinary criminals can be smug - and smugness is perhaps the product of feeling one is not morally responsible rather than feeling one has taken the right decision.

Nevertheless, it remains possible that there were a few people who genuinely believed it was their duty to obey all orders without question. Similarly there may have been some who genuinely believed in Nazi ideology. This possibility, however good the grounds for thinking that they were few in number, raises the question: can crimes of this sort be motivated by misguided moral conviction, and what would that show about the nature of morality as such?

Now, Nazi Germany has sometimes been seen as an example of the corruptive power of ideals and ideology, of how belief in a national ideal, or a social ideal, leads to the idea that anything that furthers that ideal is justified, with the result that worse and worse things are done in the name of the ideal, while its realisation remains as remote as ever. This analysis may be appropriate to Stalinism, for example; but does not seem entirely appropriate to Nazism. It is very hard to find any coherent Nazi ideology, or any genuine aim other than power and self-aggrandisement: Hitler, at the end of the war, was perfectly ready to destroy Germany and bring it down with him. It is equally hard to find any intellectual coherence in Nazi utterance: it would seem that whatever worked as propaganda was used, without regard for consistency, and the only overriding aim was to get and maintain power. Indeed, it would seem to be not so much that the observance of basic moral principles - not to murder, or torture, or lie, or steal, for example - was corrupted by ideology as that the ‘ideology’ served as a convenient excuse for not having to bother about morality, just as obeying orders did; the real reason for this was the desire for political power, and nothing in the least ‘moral’, in any sense of the word.

But what about those few - and there may have been a few - who really believed either that they should always obey orders or that it was their moral duty to kill Jews, or other undesirables? Essentially, these are moral positions of a kind, but not serious ones. A person



could reach the conclusion that a certain group of people were so corrupt that it was one’s duty to rid the world of them. But if they were a morally serious person, they would have to examine very carefully whether the conclusion was really soundly based and true, before taking so serious and irrevocable a step as the killing of another human being. And, if they did this honestly and thoroughly - indeed, if they did it pretty casually - they would have found that the charges laid against the Jews, like all racist and sexist claims, were a mixture of the false, the incoherent and the irrelevant. To be prepared to kill on supposedly moral grounds, without checking whether those grounds are factually correct, is to show oneself to be totally morally frivolous. It may seem odd to use the word ‘frivolous’ of an attitude that had such terrible consequences, but it seems to be the only appropriate word. To hold a moral position genuinely and seriously, one must be prepared to check the facts on which it is based: if one is not so prepared, the position is not a serious one, or even a real moral one.

The same is true of holding that one ought always to obey orders. For this makes moral sense only if ‘orders’ means ‘legitimate orders’ - one could not possibly hold that one should obey one’s superior if they went insane, or were seriously mistaken on a question of fact, or, more simply, if they were exceeding their authority in giving the order. Once again, the position that one should obey orders without ever checking the legitimacy of those orders cannot be a genuine moral position.

We may conclude that the sincere Nazi, corrupted by ideology, did not exist. One could support the Nazis for non-moral reasons, such as the hope of political, material or psychological benefit, or the (very justified) fears of imprisonment, torture or death. One could also support them because one gave up, consciously or unconsciously, any sense of moral responsibility, or because one adopted an essentially frivolous moral position. But to support them out of genuine, if misguided, moral conviction would be impossible: one cannot ignore facts out of genuine moral conviction but only out of a refusal to be morally serious!

I would like now to pull the three parts of this paper together. I have considered three lessons that, it has been suggested, we should learn from the Nazi era and the Holocaust - the dangers of the ‘slippery slope’; the need to disobey and resist unjust laws; and the need to resist the corruption of our moral sense by idealism and ideology. All these are valid lessons, but the last is barely a feature of Nazism; the first is, but not in the way it has been taken to be; and the second is not as important as has been made out. Moreover, in each case there is something that in fact contributed much more to the success of the Nazis than the feature here identified, and hence a more important lesson to be learnt - the need to watch out for political, rather than moral, slippery slopes, for subversion of legal procedure rather than the bringing of unjust laws, and for propaganda that is aimed at removing the sense of moral responsibility rather than harnessing the moral sense to an ideology.

Essentially, the mistake has been to see the issue of the Holocaust too much in personal moral terms, to see it in terms of individuals either resisting evil or failing to resist it. But this is to ignore the whole political dimension of what was happening. To prevent it from happening again (though it is debatable whether what has happened in many countries since 1945 is appreciably less bad), we need not only to stiffen our resolve to resist injustice, though this would help, but also to understand the political techniques by which it was brought about. I have mentioned three of these - the stage-by-stage implementation of the programme, the subversion of the legal system, and the propaganda and social conditions that reduced the sense of moral responsibility - which, I think, are all worth detailed study. But in general we need to be prepared to look at the Holocaust in political terms. To do so is


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not to trivialise it or to excuse it, as some may have feared; it is rather to be prepared to examine in detail how it came about, precisely in order to learn how to prevent a repetition.

A . H . Lesser, Department of Philosophy, University of Manchester, Manchester M 1 3 9PL, UK.

NOTES [I] Quoted in HANNAH ARENDT (1979) Eichmann in JerusaIm, 2nd edition (Harmondswonh, Penguin Books),

[2] ARENDT, op. cit., pp. 14&9. [3] L. FULLER (1964) The Morality of Law (Newhaven, Yale University Press). [4] ARENDT, op. ciz., pp. 135-6. [5] ARENDT, op. cit., p. 149.

p. 69.
