No consoling phrase can make the disaster of the 1940s bearably meaningful. The fifth decade of a harsh, wealthy century has left a shadow on history, deeper and more impenetrable than any in human experience.
Alone among European nations, the Irish long had a euphemism for the second World War - the Emergency. Growing up in the aftermath of that war, I understood that nothing could condone the Nazis, but that we could not have supported the former imperial power against them. We were neutral, and were saved - spared re-colonisation, bombing or Nazi occupation. These were not small mercies. But it was never easy to see the war and the near-destruction of the Jews that it enabled, to imagine it with any tact from a position of austere, prickly safety.
For the British, who were themselves insulated from the worst of the war, the fact of genocide was conveyed in images from Belsen, surrendered to their army on April 12th, 1945. They thought that they could see, all at once, the degradation caused by a theory of racial purity, though Belsen was not a death camp but a dumping ground for survivors and hostages, turned deadly by untreated illness and callous incompetence. We could not have that illusory sense of seeing for ourselves, and we had, necessarily, a certain detachment. Over two weeks after Belsen was liberated, de Valera made his call on Eduard Hempel to express condolences on the death of Hitler. Statesmen have to perform unpleasant formal duties, but the line between neutrality and studied indifference is easily blurred. It is as though we had averted our gaze from the world.
What was happening out there on the Eurasian plain and the islands of Micronesia had no precedent. The numbers alone cannot be held in the mind. A teacher at the Military Academy of Sandhurst has tried to sum up the balance of loss and gain, suggesting that "the human cost involved in the destruction of evil was not great but small, that perhaps 57 million dead was, in the balance of history, a small price to pay for ridding the world of depraved wickedness". This is hardheaded stuff, the language of power: anything was better than a victory for Hitler, and this is what it took. In some ways it is more attractive than the glib syrupy language of politicians talking about freedom on anniversaries of slaughter. Yet it is also a kind of arithmetical madness, morally incommensurable with the events being described.
During the war, thinking like this became instinctive. To be a "master of strategy" - the inscription on Field Marshall Alexander's pugnacious statue opposite the entrance to Downing Street - was to accept a calculus of mass death, in which the expenditure of enough lives would diminish the power of the enemy. For the arch-strategists Stalin and Hitler, but also the Japanese generals and the believers in mass civilian bombing like Arthur Harris, the murder of non-combatants was good if it demoralised the enemy survivors. And for the dictators, unlike the cautious generals of the democratic West, the loss of millions of their own soldiers was as nothing if it led to an expansion of their power and brought history to an end. It was gigantic, organised violence. As many people died of trauma and cold during the single battle of Stalingrad, which ended in January 1943, as Britain lost during the entire conflict. During the battle, the Red Army executed 14,000 of its own soldiers for hesitation or cowardice. By the end of that year the world's most advanced industrialised countries had produced 150,000 tanks and 250,000 planes in 12 months, and were consuming them in vast, rapid battles, along with the bodies of millions of human beings. It was a war of machines, but it was also a world rampage of xenophobic armies inflamed by images of the barbarian other. Even the victorious allies, the Soviet Union especially, but also the US in its war against Japan, found it useful to render the enemy demonic (and it was not hard to do so).
This combination of technical modernity and atavistic hatred - from which we distance ourselves by calling "barbaric" - helped make the war uncontrollably violent. At the heart of the war, outweighing every other atrocity, lay the Nazis' attempt to remake the world. They biologised politics, a gross exacerbation of ideas of fitness and natural selection applied to cultural and social differences, relishing the potential for violence in careless Darwinian metaphors like "the struggle for existence". If society was a competition between racial groups, then cleansing the tribe of its germ-like parasites and its own weak members became a therapeutic act, a caring medical intervention. In the mind of a Himmler, speaking at Poznan in October 1943 while the killing of helpless Jews was its most intense, it could seem an expression of "love". "We can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it." With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the war had already taken a frightful turn, Hitler's prophecy fulfilling itself, the conflict becoming in the historian Omer Bartov's words "precisely the kind of savage struggle for survival he had said it would be". Millions of Soviet prisoners of war starved to death. The regular German army shot commissars, officers and "partisans", with few scruples or restrictions. The common soldier became a mass killer of civilians. The SS, the Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews behind the lines. The Russians were subhuman, fit to be slaves; the Jews were radically anti-human, a "world plague", as Hitler had defined them in Mein Kampf, his raging manifesto.
The beginning of the organised, pseudo-scientific project of purifying humanity by ridding it of Jews coincided with the first setbacks in the Russian war. It was written into the script of Nazism, but until the Germans seized Poland no more than a few hundred Jews had actually been murdered by the regime. Between September 1939 and the middle of 1941, several thousand Jews were murdered in Poland, and more died of illness in ghettos. The killings were random and unsystematic. Once Operation Barbarossa was under way, however, the power of a modern state, its efficient industry, its talented bureaucracy, its great material culture, were applied to the orderly elimination of a human group. One of the earliest gassings took place at the Polish village of Chelmno in December 1941 (though perhaps the project might be said to have become real in 1940 with the systematic gassing of mentally-handicapped Germans). By the spring of 1942, a large murder facility had been erected at a railway junction in Silesia called Auschwitz. The killing went on in these places and at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, whole Jewish towns and communities disappearing in a matter of weeks." What they did to the Jews blurs and complicates, or it should do if we have cultivated any responsible sense of historical memory, the way we see railways, certain chemicals, industrial gasses, lists, the indifference of officials carrying out a task, the idea of race, the fear of "aliens", our recurrent hesitant belief in genetic improvement. They took up and made obscene everything that makes us modern - our science, our optimism, our genius for organising material and labour.
Raul Hilberg, a historian of the genocide, puts it very simply: "never before in history had people been killed on an assembly line basis". The Nazi system of death parodied Adam Smith's "hidden hand", thousands of transactions balancing out in a desirable harmony, the division of labour into precise and separate mechanical tasks. (Auschwitz was also a giant factory where the able-bodied produced useful things until they were too weak to work.) Responsibility and action were dispersed and made vague. Eichmann's famous "banality" was the fussing of an executive given a complex logistical task, and he could when it came to it believe that he and his victims were caught up in a web of orders and regrettable consequences over which he had no control. He tried not to think about ends, only the details and the means, in which he revelled.
Once the murder process was highly developed, and this happened so quickly, no German hand needed to touch a dead body. And forgetting would have been so easy had the Soviets not crushed the Wehrmacht. From Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka, pure death camps without industrial estates, there were literally almost no survivors - less than a hundred out of the roughly two million Jews deported to them.
The near-genocide was not carried out by sadists, on the whole: that is too comforting a thought. It was marked by an observance of law and order, and carried through by the sane, by people incapable of refusing their place in a system based partly on terror (which cannot diminish their responsibility for what they did). A modern state, with its rules and communication networks, was captured by a sect, and the internal rationality of that great machine meant that only the very brave would resist. Many, especially the young killers, were also motivated deeply by nationalist fervour, moved emotionally towards what they did. This is the darkest event in the brief history of nationalism, the most powerful cultural and emotional force in the modern world, which is also capable of such democratic decency. Like technology and science, the feeling of belonging to a community can cut both ways. The Nazi project lies at the very centre of our time, and is irreducible. It will not be made more understandable by distance or comparative analysis. German historians tried that in the late 1980s and were swept back into the pool of Nazi imagery and cliche, using Stalin's different mass murders to pardon the German soldier and relativise the death camps.
To speak of lessons from this disaster implies an educational process, a satisfying conclusion, as though we've drawn good from evil in a moral dialectic. Some historians clutch at ideas of transcendence, of the survival and triumph of the human spirit amid utter abjection. But these are phrases more worthy of the stump than of adequate historical memory. It seems equally important to resist the temptation to make of this devastation a sacred event, a sacrifice to a God. Perhaps it is better to speak more modestly. This was a human atrocity, and humans now have a new moral imperative, as the German philosopher Adorno once wrote - to prevent the recurrence of Auschwitz, and to inculcate a practical abhorrence of unbearable and deliberately inflicted agony.
There is an uncanny passage in Elias Canetti's memoirs, in which he and his friend Dr Sonne are talking about the Spanish Civil War. Their musing turns to Goya's Horrors of War, the engravings of the cruelties of the Spanish war of liberation against France, two Jews in Vienna in 1936 talking about a dreadful future in terms of a past from which nothing seems to have been learned. "He didn't look the other way," Sonne says of Goya. Canetti explains what his friend meant: "Since Grunewald's Christ no-one had depicted horror as he did, no whit better than it was - sickening, crushing, cutting deeper than any promise of redemption - yet without succumbing to it. The pressure he put on the viewer, the undeviating direction he gave to his gaze, was the ultimate in hope, though no-one would have dared call it by that name." Democratic rights include the right not to care, to mind your business and ignore threats to your neighbour's existence - even your own. Tzvetan Todorov ends Facing the Extreme, his meditation on complicity in Nazi and Stalinist evil, with the admission that "most onlookers let events take their course". But the truth is that most of us, most of the time, do not look on at all, even when our own state is not the perpetrator and we don't have the excuse of fear. The cord connecting us, the bystanders, to the greatest perpetrators is tighter than we think, because they usually can't bear to look on cruelty. Pinochet has probably never seen a tortured body. At his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann described the only time he was present at a gassing, at the Chelmno death camp. "I couldn't even look at it. All the time I was trying to avert my sight from what was going on. It was quite enough for me what I saw."
Neil Belton is author of The Good Listener. Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty, published by the Orion Publishing Group, which has won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize: Non-Fiction for 1999.
