Polish Indifference to Holocaust a Myth Mayer

Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final Solution” In History, by Arno J. Mayer. 1990

Poles’ Trauma Under Nazi Germany, and Not Polish Anti-Semitism, Bred Polish “Indifference” to Jews

Author Arno J. Mayer perceptively writes: “The local populations became indifferent to the torments of the Jews less because of any residual Judeophobia than because they, too, were being terrorized and brutalized, even if to a lesser extent.” (p. 273).

He gets it!

HITLER MOTIVATED BY THE DESIRE FOR LEBENSRAUM, NOT BY “GOING AFTER” THE JEWS

The author dispels some Holocaust myths. To begin with, he realizes that the 1939 German conquest of Poland was motivated by lebensraum, not by any desire to exploit and exterminate Poland’s Jews. (p. 11). The same holds for the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.

HOLOCAUST AND POLOKAUST WERE INTERTWINED

In most Holocaust materials, the Nazi murders of non-Jews are ignored or relegated to a footnote. In contrast, Mayer consistently interweaves the fates of Jews and non-Jews, finding parallels in the escalations of Nazi acts against both groups. He takes a strongly functionalist (as opposed to intentionalist) view of the Holocaust, and rejects the premise that the mass killings of Jews by the likes of Einsatzgruppen units on the Russian front in 1941 were already the fruits of an exterminationist policy. He contends that the turning point in the war came in late 1941, when Nazi Germany failed to force the collapse of the USSR. It was at this time that the Nazi movement became desperate and self-radicalized. Hardened by its military misfortunes and the increasing savagery of the war, it then turned fully against the Jews.

We have heard the bizarre argument that, whereas Jews had no choice but death, the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis had a choice. Mayer dispels this nonsense. In speaking of all those who died in WWII, he comments: “Easily over 50 percent and probably closer to 70 percent of the dead were noncombatants. Among Europe’s 18 million civilian war dead, the bulk was Russians and Poles, without counting Russian and Polish Jews.” (p. 13).

Mayer doesn’t dichotomize the usually-slow deaths of mostly non-Jewish inmates at Nazi concentration camps and the usually-quick deaths of mostly-Jewish inmates at extermination camps. (e. g., p. 349). Both were forms of hyperexploitation that occurred within the context of universal economic mobilization and of many forms of deportation and resettlement. (p. 349). Concentration and extermination camps both grew in capacity after 1941. For instance, “ordinary” concentration camps held about 100,000 registered inmates in late 1942. (p. 336). By January 1945, the number of inmates had grown to about 713,000 (p. 424), and this doesn’t count the 700,000-800,000 who had already died or been killed in such “ordinary” camps. (p. 336).

It has been argued that the gas chambers had been used specifically on Jews. This is untrue. Mass gassings of the infirm and mentally ill of Germany (p. 383) and of German-occupied Poland (p. 385) had been performed long before the Jews met the same fate.