Nicola Hamilton
Stone, Dan, ‘The Holocaust: Child of Modernity’ in Histories of the Holocaust. (Oxford, 2010). Pp 113-159
Dan Stone in his chapter analyses the ‘modernity’ debate surrounding the Holocaust and examines to what extent the Holocaust came as a result of modernity. Debates about modernity asks whether the Holocaust was brought around not by ‘medieval barbarianism’ but rather by the logic of modernity itself. Ultimately, instead of understanding the Holocaust as a return to an earlier tradition of murderous Jew hatred, seen in the First Crusade, Stone attempts to examine the roots of the Holocaust from modern race science. Characteristics of modern society such as; technology, bureaucracy, state control over populations and the idea that nation states should be threatened by difference, all gave a rise to genocide which could not have been done in pre-modern conditions.
Zygmunt Bauman supports Stone’s claim as Bauman argued that the Holocaust was an outcome of modernity itself, rather than a throwback to pre-modern barbarianism. He did not think that the Holocaust was one of the necessary outcomes of modernity but he did believe that it was one of its many ‘hidden possibilities’. Through Bauman’s argument it is clear to understand that bureaucracy was an essential part of the Holocaust but whether it was an essential characteristic or carrier is questioned.
Nazi ideology was extremely widespread and promoted by influential individuals. The murder of Jews, according to Stone, was driven by Nazi’s paranoid conspiracy theory of the world. While Nazi propaganda was filled with antisemitic imagery, there is no clear root as to what drove individuals to take part in genocide. Jürgen Matthäus and Edward Westermann’s essay states that the SS and the Order Police structured and legitimised murderous antisemitism even before the ‘Jewish question’ was raised – highlighting an individual perpetrator motivation. In terms of perpetrator institutions, Stone claims modernity was less of a driving force for the Holocaust than the setting for it. When examining the workings of these agencies and the individuals who worked for them, capabilities in these institutions varied but they all stared a common goal in targeting Jews. This picture of Nazi institutions creates a weak version of the modernity argument as the predominance of bureaucratisation, instrumental thinking and rationalisation was not the motor of the Holocaust but rather the channel through which it was carried. So, while historians claim that modernity was a driving force for the Holocaust, they fail to mention where the idea for exterminating Jewish people came from.
Moreover, Stone considers what Nazi agencies’ role in terms of modernity was. The Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptant (WVHA) was founded in 1942 and led by Oswald Pohl. As of March 1942, the WVHA controlled the concentration camps and managed a huge economic empire with 40,000 employees who oversaw half a million concentration camp inmates. The WVHA used modern techniques of combining bureaucratic procedures and legal norms in order to control the concentration camps. The transition to gas chambers indicated to most historians that something modern was occurring; “erection of extermination camps signified the decisive step in the history of genocide’s development” (p 145), as previously a firing squad would have been used to massacre a group of people. Michael Thad Allen agued that plans for erecting gas chambers in Auschwitz can be dated to October-November 1941. Therefore, Allen states that modernity alone can not account for the emergence of a death camp in Auschwitz and the mission to exterminate Jews was the prerequisite for this effort, not a product of it.
Overall, in terms of architecture, technology and the state of infrastructure – especially railways – the Holocaust can be defined as ‘modern’. Frank Bajor claims that “the mass murder of European Jews would not have been possible in its vast dimensions without the institutions of a modern bureaucratic state” (p 158). Through the studies of Nazi agencies and the concentration camps which Stone examined, it shows that modernity was vital to the implementation of the Holocaust but does not account for the origin of Nazi ideas to murder millions of Jews.