In his book The Meaning of the Second World War, Ernest Mandel offers an explanation of the Holocaust which describes it as the outcome of a long history of European imperialism and racism. Mandel was one of a small group of European Marxists who simultaneously opposed Stalinism and fascism. Unlike his comrade Abram Leon, he survived despite being arrested twice and held in a concentration camp.  

Nearly all commentators have treated Hitler’s fanatic anti-semitism leading to the Holocaust as beyond rational explanation – something totally different from all other ideologies of the twentieth century (i.e. the imperialist era). We do not think that such drastic historical exceptionalism can be empirically or logically sustained.

In its extreme form racism is congenitally linked to institutionalised colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, the one canne function without the ideological protection of the other. It is impossible for thinking human beings – and colonialists, imperialists and defenders of their specific ‘order’ are thinking human beings – to deny millions of men, women and children elementary human rights without attempting to rationalise and justify these indignities and oppressions by a specific ideological sophism – to inferiority, or a combination of these – i.e. by an attempt to “dehumanize” them ideologically. But once large groups of human beings are considered as intrinsically inferior – as ‘sub-human’, a Untermenschen, as some species of animal” – then it only takes one more ideological-political step to deny them, not only the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to life itself. In the peculiar – and increasingly destructive – suicidal combination of ‘perfect’ local rationality and extreme global irrationality which characterises international capitalism, this step is frequently taken.

From the slave trade to the Holocaust

In other words, the seeds of the Holocaust are not to be found in traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-semitism – although, naturally, such anti-semitism among sectors of the Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, Hungarian, and Russian petty bourgeoisie offered fertile ground for tolerating and aiding the Holocaust. This type of anti-semitism led to pogroms, which were to the Nazi murderers what knives are to the atom bomb. The seeds of the gas chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors.” In such cases, the term genocide is fully justified: millions of men, women and children were killed just because they belonged to a supposed ‘inferior’, ‘subhuman’ or ‘wicked’ collective group.

 It is true that these crimes of colonialism/imperialism occurred outside Europe. But it was precisely German imperialism’s ‘manifest destiny’ to colonise Eastern Europe. The Nazis and the most extreme proponents of the imperialist doctrine of racial superiority by no means intended the enslavement and extermination only of the Jews; gypsies and sections of the Slav people figure on the same list.” 

Most historians and other commentators conveniently forget that the first group of Untermenschen to be slaughtered in the gas chambers during the war were not Jews but ethnic Germans certified ‘mentally insane’: two hundred thousand of these (again, men, women and children) were exterminated in 1940-41 in Aktion T 4.

One should add that the Japanese atrocities in ‘unit 731’ in Manchuria are only one rung below Auschwitz, and can only be explained by a mentality and motivation basically similar to that of Herrenvolk. As for the callous killing of two hundred and fifty thousand Japanese civilians (again, men, women and children) by dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if it is not exactly comparable to the Holocaust in the scope of its inhumanity, it certainly reflected a contempt for human beings of a “’special kind” which is not at all that far removed from extreme racism.

Systematic state terrorism 

When we say that the germ of the Holocaust is to be found in colonialism and imperialism’s extreme racism, we do not mean that the germ inevitably and automatically produces the disease in its worst form. For that eventuality, racist madness has to be combined with the deadly partial rationality of the modern industrial system. Its efficiency must be supported by a servile civil service, by a consistent disregard of individual critical judgement as basically ‘subversive’ (Befehl ist Befehl) by thousand of passive executive agents (in fact: passive accomplices of crime); by the conquest of power by desperado-type political personnel of a specific bourgeoisie, and that class’s readiness to let them exercise political power; by a frenzy of a va banque aggression unleashed, not only by these desperadoes, but also by significant sectors of big business itself; by cynical realpolitik leading to the worst blackmail and systematic state terrorism (Goering, Hitler and co. threatening to eradicate, successively, Prague, Rotterdam, London, Coventry – ‘wir werden ihre Stadte ausradieren!’: something which became credible only if such threats were occasionally implemented); by the gradual implementation of that state terrorism unleashing an implacable logic of its own by a fetid substratum of unconscious guilt and shame, which had to be rationalised in spite (or better: in function) of monstrous crimes. The Holocaust only comes at the end of this long causal chain. But it can and must  be explained through it. Indeed, those who understood the chain, were able to foresee it.

Himmler told the assembled Gauleiter and Reichsleiter of Germany on October 6, 1943: “The following question has been posed to us [in relation to the extermination of the Jews): “Why do about the women and children?” – I reflected, and here found an obvious solution. I didn’t think I had the right to exterminate the men… and let the children who would eventually take vengeance on our children and their descendants grow up. The grave decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earths Two days earlier, Himmler developed the same theme more extensively at Poznan, before an assembly of leading SS officers.

This is an extract from Ernest Mandel: The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso).