Treblinka II – Indifference, Death & Productivity.
The Steps from Hate Speech to Genocide.
by Martin Schinagl
It is a gentle beautiful day. The sun is hot and the heat of the skin is cooled by the mild wind that delivers the smell of fresh wood. I hear the chirp of two birds, one following the other. I am surrounded by trees, with a view on a small open field. This is Treblinka II, the death camp. But nothing is left here that made this place somewhere we remember. In the midst of the Polish forests in the scarcely populated areas in the very east close to Belarus, Treblinka II served as one of the six German Nazi death camps from July 1942 to October 1943. It is one of the logistical results of the objectives of the “Aktion Reinhardt” that demanded the total extermination of Polish Jews. In the short timespan of one year, they had annihilated the old and complex culture of Jewish believers and its relatives.Not only that, but by October 1943 the whole camp had been eradicated, bodies exhumed and burned, the whole place and soil been sanitized so that no traces were to be found and no survivors left. There was nothing left, nothing physical but ash and the stories of a dozens survivors that were heard with little attention in the post-war times.
These are scales of the unimaginable, the indescribable and not understandable. Numbers of dead so large, that they convey but a nothingness that stands beyond the abstract and concrete. What's left is the moral of never again... Nie wieder Auschwitz! And also nie wieder Treblinka! In order to prevent, one may ask the question of how it could come to this? And let's not forget that it does, but why is genocide repeatedly happening again and again?
Standing on the grounds of the camp, seeing the assumed outline as they are indicated by large stones that pierce out the ground an emotion of surprise struck me: This place is small. Standing close to the entry where a gate used to be, where SS staff and physicists had their little chairs and spaces for leisure activities, a little zoo close by to keep the camp managers a little more entertained, it is just a hundred meters away to the „train station“ where the cattle wagons full with mainly Polish Jews arrived, were to be unclothed and, after they had made their passage through the Himmelstraße, put to the brick stone gas chamber.
This camp is tiny. And it served one objective: The production of (profitable) death. As a materialization of compressed Nazi ideology it fulfilled its role for the racialized, industrialized, systematic extermination in the mode of regressive capitalism in perfection. It stood at the end of a culmination of a long process of developments in politics, cultures, ethics and perceptions. What counted at the end was – out of the perspective of the perpetrators – described in terms of efficiency, costs, and logistics. A hundred year long terribly fruitful synthesis of nationalism, eugenics, science, social Darwinism and anti-Semitism had paved the path for a German national socialist movement and government to implement a state run and widely accepted administrative and logistical system of party and military organization, racist research, and legal constitution. They gave perfect explanation for the exploitation through difference and inner colonization of Europe.
The evil became banality. Evil so is not an offspring of a will for wrongdoing, but is seen out of the perpetrator's perspective as the side product of the acts and procedures of others. Soldiers in charge, often intelligent, invited their wives or parents, because of what they did seemed legitimate, or as something even to be proud of as they believed to serve their fatherland. They acted in accordance to what seemed necessary, following orders in order to survive. The camp is thus less a place of pure evil, but more precisely a condensed place of system, hierarchy, efficiency, logistics, calculations, and advanced technology. Considering the economics and acknowledging that the deaths of hundreds of thousands were a profitable turn-out due to the confiscated property and bodily materials, that were “recycled”, reused, and resold, made the rationalization of conducting such a place possible. Even work, as in human capital, and worthiness – a horrible attribute given to any human, no matter how high or low ones “value” may be – has ceased to hold any meaning. Not even destruction through work plays a role, but the most effective way of destruction only, and pure annihilation.
The ghettos and concentration camps are the space where the state of exception becomes rule, where the state tries not only to gain totalitarian control over the individuals, but also over their bodies. The victims are reduced to a “bare life” of survival. But even then death camps go beyond. They are the industrialized answer at the end of a process towards a reactionary dualism of what naturally is dialectic, thriving for social unification by annihilation of the enemy other.
So how did we get there? What brings human beings to do this? Let alone the economic and historic dynamics, Gregory H. Stanton has made an effort to generalize the processes that lead to genocide out of a rather socio-psychological perspective. Eight to ten steps may be recognized. They may not be linear, and preventive measures can always stop the process, but each stage comes after another, and all stages operate throughout the process. Stage one is classification, a stage where differences are naturalized, and an us/them-divide is constructed. This is followed by the acts of symbolization, or where symbols like dress codes and names, problematic especially if combined with hatred, may be forcefully introduced upon an inferior group. There is a rise of systematic discrimination that comes with it, where with the use of law, custom, and political power a dominant group pressures another group.
The stage of dehumanization hits in, when the “victim group” is equaled as animals, insects, or alike. Subsequent technical preparations for a coming genocide take place. They may be state run, but they need the support of (large) parts of civil society. Physical exclusion now adds up to the humiliation, and eventually if the process has not been stopped by this moment the act of murder and mass killing is almost inevitable. After the genocide has taken place, effort is done to erase any traces, and to silence the survivors, and the stage of denial sets in. Eventually, the act of killing is silenced, as is any debate, so as if the genocide has never happened and should soon be forgotten.
Hate speech is one of the first things to be developed at the early stages and the fundaments of argumentation may be elaborated through scientific research, statistics, and ideological knowledge. It rests a constant vehicle in the progress and continuation of the process, as it advertises and induces the notion of indifference towards a victim group. It numbs the ability of the “othering us” to humanize, and hierarchical and systemic structures take away individual responsibilities of what is clearly to be judged evil and wrong.
There is a constant need to fight that as society in society. And especially the early stages can be counterattacked by the responsibilisation of ones own actions. As remembering past genocides, subverting hierarchies, fighting any kind of naturalization of differences or valuation and devaluation of human beings, are crucial points to not only prevent any of the steps on the path to genocide, but to appreciate human life, culture, and practices as a whole in general. This means reflecting one's own positions and systemic privileges, supporting victim groups, even by the means of sacrifices. It's good to bridge the divides between them and us. This is not only necessary, but it's a beautiful thing to do.
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