The assertion that he Shoah was meaningless is of course borne out of an act of historical revision that both perfectly resonates with how it had been absorbed in post-war German political culture: It quickly “moved on” from asking questions about the rise of National Socialism to becoming absorbed into fighting communism as part of the Cold War. The assertion that the Shoah was meaningless and made no sense means, that there is no need to investigate its exact genesis. It also explains why that which goes by the name of Holocaust Remembrance Education as part of the German fetishization of “Erinnerungskultur” has very little to do with education or with memory, but more with silencing any attempt at providing a causal and contextual analysis.
One of the peculiar side effects of this ideological turn was that the framework of fighting communism in post-war West Germany looked very similar to the framework of fighting communism in the Weimar Republic before it was replaced by the Third Reich. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, anti-communism culminated in electoral victories of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Fascist violence was first directed against working class politics and trade unions, among whom many Jews, but not against the Jewish people as such.
It is important to note that the systematic omission of understanding the rise of fascism as related to a crisis in capitalism was not simply a mistake. It was deliberately designed by the Western Allies. This silence was institutionalized almost immediately after the end oft he Second World War. In 1951, under Konrad Adenauer the Gesetz zur Regelung der Rechtsverhältnisse der unter Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes fallenden Personen) was approved, by which about 400,000 former members of the NSDAP could be restored to work for the government, including recognizing their work for the Third Reich for the payments of their pensions. This amounted to a broad amnesty and reintegration, effectively ending Allied-led efforts to prevent Nazi influence in public institutions. In 1954, amnesty was extended to people who had been convicted of crimes related to their work for the Third Reich. By that time, already one third of those working in public administration in the FDR were former members of the NSDAP.
Whereas these amnesties only applied to allegedly low level functionaries, the CIA recruited former members of the SS and Gestapo in their fight against communism under the code name Operation Bloodstone (the goal justifies the means after all); whereas high-ranking scientists associated with the Third Reich had been recruited under Operation Paperclip. Thirdly, Operation Gladio was a covert NATO-backed program established during the Cold War to create “stay-behind” paramilitary networks across Western Europe. Its purpose was to prepare for potential Soviet invasion or communist takeover, but it later became controversial due to its alleged involvement in political manipulation, terrorism, and false-flag operations.
The non-sense of the Shoah that Clemens Hine refers to is much easier understood against the light of these deliberate activities to shift public attention away from any critical analysis of the close links between fascism, antisemitism, nationalism, capitalism and the role of the state. For Heni, there is apparently no historical relevance in investigating how the Haavara Agreement of 1933 became a means for the Third Reich to circumvent an international economic boycott – as this would expose an opportunistic alignment of interest between anti-Semitism and Zionism.
The horrors of the systematic, institutionalized mass murder of 6 million Jews cannot be overstated, but that does not mean that it did not have a history. It evolved over time. It required many factors to be in place. For example, the militarization of inland security, in response to civil unrest, is not unique to the Weimar Republic. It also happened in Italy, and today, it is happening in many places around the world, the USA and Israel being prime examples. What caused this emergence of civil unrest? Were they spontaneous, as popular uprisings, or more provoked by para-military agitators, such as the Squadrissimo in Italy, the KKK in the USA, or the SA in the Weimar Republic? Whose interests were prioritized by the militarized security apparatus? How did it affect the operations of the state?
There is sufficient historical research that suggests that “communists” were depicted as “enemies within”, a role usually ascribed to Jews in 19th Century Europe. The tropes were already there. All that was needed was a link. “Jewish Bolshevism” was invented to ethnize political opponents and reduce politics to identity-interests. The concentration camps that were initially built to imprison and humiliate political opponents became the death camps for Jews, gays, Roma, Sinti and others who were deemed “enemies of the state”.
Whereas Clemens Hine keeps insisting that these were all crimes against humanity that became unspeakable once they turned into the “Endlösung der Judenfrage”, anyone with a modicum of historical-scientific curiosity will want to investigate what enabled this shift? Who were the beneficiaries of the elimination of the German Communist Party, the prohibition of worker’s unions (in 1933 all union leaders were arrested) and their replacement with the German Labour Front (which was not a union). Its purpose was to enforce labour discipline, promote Nazi ideology, and maintain productivity. This is a powerful illustration of why the original name of fascism was corporatism. By eliminating unions and the communist party, corporations no longer had to worry about restrictions on the exploitation of labour.
Needless to say, under such conditions, many people in Germany were confronted by the fact that under National Socialism things did not get better but much worse instead. The invocation of the Jews as a scapegoat was therefore primarily cynical and opportunistic. Corporatism does not unite a nation as it is difficult to mobilize popular support for labour exploitation and reducing women to national incubators as such (I will analyse this in a separate blog entry), one needs an enemy. As the Jew as the main trope of the enemy-within already had longer historical roots, antisemitism was readily available both as an amplification of the fear of communism as well as an amplification of what Freud identified as the neurosis that accompanies “modernity”. Antisemitism is not some kind of autonomous mental affliction as “scholars” such as Heni claim, but instead a cultivated ´discourse of divide and conquer. Nationalism is like a religion and needs a scapegoat .
Scapegoats unite a political community but an enemy-within also engenders a neurosis that causes a yearning for messianic authority. Adolf Hitler personified just that. His self-presentation as a worker-soldier who had sacrificed everything for the love of the nation might have come across as quite authentic, especially in an environment where mass media such as radio and cinema were fairly new and illiteracy quite high (McLuhan). Leni Riefenstahl’s innovative cinematography of The 1934 Nurnberg Rally (The Triumph of the Will) created an iconic image of a man whose passion was presented as the incarnated will of the people. The editorial montage switching between Hitler and the enchanted masses, acting as one, imprinted this as a permanent visual image.
Merging an individual person with “the will of the people” enabled a justification of the by-passing of due process, as only He could save the people from the impending doom. However, this also opened the door to the chaos of arbitrariness. When law and due process are subordinated to the will of one person, his whims also become law. Hence, it is easy to explain how the scapegoating of Jewish people could escalate into the Shoah. It also explains why the German State of the Third Reich was relatively silent on the actual reality of the extermination camps. The Holocaust was never openly supported by a large majority of Germans. Officially, nothing was known about what happened; there were of course rumours, but these could be easily dismissed if one did not want to believe them.
In short, the combination of a militarized state supported by extra-legal militia, an amplification of economic exploitation of the working class through the expansion of corporatism and the repression of labour-rights, the deployment of mass media-based propaganda to construct a notion of nationhood that required complete obedience and submission (especially for women to focus on their reproductive duties) in combination with the mobilization of antisemitism in the creation of the scapegoat as an enemy-within, forged the conditions in which the Shoah could become normalized.
Anyone who tries to explain the Third Reich as created on the basis of a widespread hatred of Jews is deliberately obscuring the triad of European barbarism: Imperialism, Patriarchy and Capitalism. Why? Because they want to continue the bourgeois ideology that enables the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. Clearly, this is not simply a Zionist interest, as Zionism is but one example of bourgeois ideology, which happens to collude with “Western” interests to stop the formation of a communist alternative.
By referring to the Shoah as indescribable, unique, without comparison, people like Heni actively prohibit lessons to be learned from it. There are no lessons to be learned from his own account: The Shoah was caused by antisemitism, thus the Shoah can be prevented by fighting and eliminating antisemitism. Since antisemitism is presented as a mental affliction that can only be sanctioned, it has no history, it has no narrative, it has no purpose. A critique of analysing antisemitism as just another version of racism, directed against an enemy-within might, have made some sense in medieval Europe. However, after European imperialism had established a global hegemony, all enemies are effectively enemies-within. Now the arguments that try to make a clear distinction between antisemitism and racism can only be upheld by racist assumptions, because they are arbitrary and completely immersed in the neurotics of identity thinking.
More recently Heni has adjusted his position vis-à-vis the Israeli military operations in Gaza as being harmful to Israel. ““If even staunchly Zionist academics… demand an immediate end to the war in Gaza, then the war must end—for the sake of Israel and Judaism”. That is, if the genocidal war crimes had been given a better international press, Heni might not have distanced himself as much. This is the typical liberal-Zionist position: it operates completely within the racist framework that constitutes the State of Israel; its criticism of Netanyahu is not because of his indictment for war crimes, but for the sake of Israel’s international credibility.
Disaffected Sociology 
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