The Nazis, antisemitism and the Holocaust

Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago

Auschwitz Birkenau death camp was liberated 80 years ago this week. It was at the core of an industrial killing machine driven by the Nazis’ antisemitic ideology.

The Nazis murdered more than six million Jews, two thirds of Europe’s Jewish ­population, between 1941 and 1945. A further five million people deemed to be “untermenschen” or subhuman perished in the ­death camps.

We say “Never Again” on Holocaust Memorial Day. But if it is to be more than a slogan, we have to understand what paved the way to the horrors of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust isn’t marked out just by the scale of the killing—though it is staggering—or that a state that drove the extermination of a whole group of people.

There are other ­examples in history of states ­carrying out genocide. Belgium murdered millions of people in the Congolese genocide. We’ve watched a genocide in Gaza on our phone screens for over a year, a brutal reminder that state-orchestrated mass murder didn’t end in 1945.

The Holocaust is marked by its uniquely industrial nature. It was a capitalist murder, made possible by one of the world’s most advanced capitalist states.

Railways transported people from across Europe to death camps. Some of Germany’s ­biggest corporations played a pivotal role and profited from the mass murder.

They provided Zyklon B for the gas chambers in the death camps and used inmates as slave labour. IBM‑supplied machines processed the data that made the vast, ­bureaucratic process possible.

But corporations profiting isn’t the only link to capitalism. The Nazis grew out of social crisis and the failure of working class revolution to break through in the aftermath of the First World War.

When it’s faced with crisis, the ruling class can turn to more authoritarian methods. And if faced with a threat to its whole system, it can drop democracy all together and look to fascism.

The revolutionary ­socialist Leon Trotsky argued that ­fascism was a “razor in the hands of the class enemy”.

“At the moment that the ‘normal’ policy and military resources of the bourgeois   dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium,” he wrote, “the turn of the fascist regime arrives.”

The German ruling class was haunted by the ­revolution of 1918 that overthrew the Kaiser—and threatened capitalism itself—in the 1920s and 30s.

The Nazis weren’t the first choice of the German capitalist class. President Paul von Hindenburg hoped that conservative politicians and military officers would restore order.

But, as the crisis deepened, sections of the capitalist class began to warm to the idea of fascism restoring order and stability. By 1932, it looked to bring the fascists into government.

The ruling class had already begun destroying liberal democracy. Since 1930, Germany had been run by the “Cabinet of the Barons”, right wing politicians and generals who ruled through presidential decree.

But they had little support in parliament, let alone among ordinary people—and faced a mass working class movement. Hitler’s Nazi party, the NSDAP, did have a mass base. It made a parliamentary breakthrough in 1930 as the Great Depression began.

Its street fighting wing, the Brownshirts, terrorised Communists, socialists, trade unionists and other political opponents. By 1933, when the Nazis took power, their numbers had swelled to two million.

Germany’s ruling class wanted to use this movement to crush the working class.

How did fascism build this base? Fascism is an extreme form of counter-revolution. It seeks to roll back the gains made by genuine revolutionary movements.

The Nazis wanted to smash the left, workers’ organisations, civil society and all democratic rights as a reactionary solution to the crisis.

But they didn’t win supporters just by defending the status quo. They used a “revolutionary” rhetoric to build a base among middle class sections of society—the shopkeeper whose livelihood was wrecked by hyperinflation or the ­small-time capitalist undercut by big corporations.

They promised a “national revolution” that would “restore Germany’s greatness”. This meant targeting not just the left but the corrupt political establishment and big business. But how could they square the circle between backing the system and their middle class supporters who were squeezed by it? Antisemitism was key.

The Nazis built on and radicalised the antisemitism already pushed by the German ruling class.

Jewish people faced ­persecution before the rise of capitalism. But it was focused on religion and did not paint Jews as a distinct, separate “race”. That changed with the development of capitalism and ­“scientific racism”. 

From the late 1800s, “the Jews” were blamed for worldwide depression, France’s failure in a war and the rise of Germany’s socialist movement.

Ruling classes used ­antisemitism, like other forms of racism, to divide and rule. But antisemitism does more than provide a scapegoat—it gives a reactionary explanation for societal crisis.

Antisemitism deflects blame from the real capitalist elite onto a fake “Jewish elite”. Jewish people were presented simultaneously as capitalists and in league with Communists—they were accused of “Judeo Bolshevism”. Their destruction was, according to the Nazis’ ideology, necessary to restore Germany’s greatness.

Hitler disguised a counter-revolutionary ­movement with fake “revolutionary” language. But the contradiction could not be resolved.

The Brownshirts argued for a “second revolution” after Hitler had taken power in 1933. But Hitler had no intention of challenging capitalism and had carefully reassured Germany’s capitalists that they were no threat. The Brownshirts’ rhetoric worried capitalists. Hitler wiped out their leadership by mass execution in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. But the contradiction remained.  

Trotsky had referred to the Nazis’ middle class base as “human dust”—in order to glue it together the Nazis increasingly relied on antisemitic ideology. This dynamic is crucial to explaining the Holocaust.

The Nazis’ antisemitism, obsession with racial purity, and support for imperialism went hand in hand. After the Second World War began in 1939, the Nazis rounded up Jews into “ghettos” in the ­territories that they occupied.

The Einsatzgruppen—special SS death squads—massacred Jewish people as Germany took over swathes of Russian territory in 1941 to 1942. They first relied on mass shootings, then turned to gas vans.

In January 1942, senior SS and government officials met at the Wannsee conference. They meticulously planned the “Final Solution”, the industrial mass murder of Jewish people.

The Nazis began ­liquidating the “ghettos” and stepped up massacres of Jewish people. They then authorised mass deportations to the east and the setting up of death camps.

Some have argued that the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes represented the interests of the German capitalist class. But there were tensions between the Nazis and the bosses. The capitalists retained economic control, while the regime had political control. When the two clashed, the Nazis asserted dominance.

For example, in 1935 the Nazi regime wanted to focus investment on heavy industry to build up the military at the expense of other export industries. Steel baron Fritz Thyssen—who had backed Hitler and the Nazis—opposed the move. The Nazi state took over his factories.

It’s certainly true that big firms profited from the Holocaust. IG Farben had a purpose built factory at Auschwitz-Monowitz and used Jewish slave labour from the camp. But the death camps cannot be explained purely in economic terms.

At the height of the Second World War, the Nazis diverted precious military resources into carrying out their “Final Solution”. Even when the Nazis were losing on the Eastern Front, they ploughed resources into the genocide.

Understanding the role of antisemitic ideology is vital. The ruling class turned to the Nazis, and the Nazis held their base together through antisemitism and eventually genocide. As Germany’s fortunes changed in the war, the regime radicalised and accelerated its extermination plans.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day comes at an urgent time. We need to remember the Holocaust when there is a battle over how it is understood and interpreted.

The inheritors of fascism are breaking through in Germany, France and Austria. They lead the government in Italy.

The horrors of the Holocaust mean that it’s been harder for today’s fascists to openly embrace antisemitism. Many proclaim their support for Israel and Zionism, claiming this means they cannot be antisemitic.

But ­antisemitic ideology is still an important feature for many fascist parties. It’s cloaked in conspiracy theories and fake anti-establishment rhetoric. A touch stone for the far right is the “Great Replacement Theory”. It claims that “elites”—a code word they use for Jews—are importing Muslim migrants to replace white people in Europe and North America.

Fascists and their ideas are now being normalised by the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.

We have to mobilise against fascism, the far right and racism—but also the capitalist system that produces that filth and horror.