It could happen again
On the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the warning signs are everywhere
My neighbors love history. They watch the HISTORY Channel religiously, and they’re big fans of World War II documentaries. They’re specifically fascinated by the Holocaust. When we talk about it, they ask me with pained looks on their faces, “How could this have happened?”
It’s a profound question. How did nearly 70 million German citizens participate actively or passively in the mass murder of millions of people over a span of a decade—not to mention the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks, Austrians, Czechoslovakians, French, Dutch, Belgians and others who collaborated with them?
Museums around the world have attempted to answer this question, in addition to thousands of books and tens-of-thousands of articles. During the past six weeks, however, we have actually seen the contours of how it could happen. This does not mean it will happen; the future is ours to determine, and we have enough information and experience to prevent it. But we also have enough knowledge to recognize when the groundwork is being laid for it.
A tragedy such as the Holocaust does not occur randomly or instantaneously. Conditions must be created in order for its perverse logics to become justifiable to a broad enough segment of the population. Groundwork must be laid across multiple segments of society—including indoctrination that frames complex crises as stark bipolar choices that can only be solved by violence, and the erosion of aspects of civil society meant to uphold human rights and equality. Sometimes that erosion happens over decades or centuries; other times it happens in a manner of years, months or days.
Take, as an example, Austria in 1938. In March of that year, the country of Austria ceased to exist, absorbed into Nazi Germany. The previous month, Austrian Jews were citizens with nearly identical rights as their neighbors. The next day, Jews in Vienna were rounded up by those same neighbors and humiliated in the streets, forced to scrub the sidewalks on their hands and knees, beaten, and their possessions stolen. For those who lived through it, it seemed to happen overnight. But the groundwork was laid much earlier.
The Nazi party in Austria had been gaining momentum throughout the decade, slowly and methodically creeping into all aspects of political life. Antisemitism, always just below the surface, found renewed embodiment as inflammatory rhetoric accused Jews of having too much power and too much control over Austrian society, despite being only 3 percent of the population. The Austrian state that had “allowed” Jews to accumulate so much power had to be overthrown; once the state and its agencies were dissolved, Jewish citizens no longer had protection. The Austrian state itself was only twenty years old, an ethnically German enclave carved by world governments out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the conclusion of World War I. Many Germans, including Adolf Hitler, believed that Austria did not deserve to exist.
In the case of Austria, then, the groundwork was laid by:
Scapegoating a small minority as the source of Austria’s larger, complex problems;
Inflaming hatred and antisemitism that had simmered below the surface for generations;
Allowing a poisonous ideology to seep into all corners of society unchecked;
Claiming that the Austrian state was illegitimate, and that violence was justified to eradicate it and its enablers.
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. Today, Jewish groups and concerned citizens around the world have felt similarly, one of the reasons why “Never Again is Now” became the organizing slogan for a recent commemoration in Germany to mark the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Kristallnacht occurred in November 1938 when rioters across Germany beat, robbed and attacked Jewish residents. The attacks were meant to look spontaneous; in fact, they were closely coordinated behind the scenes.
“What is happening now reminds me exactly of how it started back then,” Margot Friedländer told The Guardian at the commemoration held in Berlin this month. Friedländer, now 102-years-old, survived Kristallnacht and deportation to a concentration camp, and was a guest of German chancellor Olaf Scholz at the event. She was referring to the approximately 2,000 antisemitic attacks reported in Germany since October 7. Such attacks in Europe and around the world are meant to look spontaneous, but, in fact, they are coordinated and encouraged behind the scenes. In one example, an organization that seeks to “globalize the intifada” posted a map on social media of Jewish-owned businesses and landmarks it claimed were “an office of the enemy” and encouraged its followers to attack them.
When we look at our world today—and particularly on social media—a playbook is unfolding that is similar to 1938:
Jews are scapegoated as the source of all problems in the Middle East and around the world, despite being a small religious minority;
Jews are accused of having too much power and too much control over world affairs, particularly the media and the U.S. government, taking old antisemitic tropes and repackaging them for a contemporary audience;
An ideology with hate at its core is seeping into all corners of society unchecked—whether it be university professors and college students who target Jewish students; doctors and lawyers who refuse to treat Jewish patients or see Jewish clients; bus drivers who refuse to drive Jewish passengers; or within government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where an employee responsible for asylum cases was openly and brazenly antisemitic on social media;
Repeated claims that the State of Israel does not deserve to exist and that any violence against it is justified, including rape, torture, mutilations and beheadings. (In one gruesome discovery after October 7, Israeli medics found a field of dead bodies with no heads.)
What was, perhaps, most alarming and distressing about 1938 was how millions of everyday people allowed it to happen. Neighbors who did not actively participate in the killing or robbing turned a blind eye towards it. Today, a similar silence has not gone unnoticed. As posted on LinkedIn by my friend and colleague Michael Glickman, Jewish organizations have been dismayed to find those who it considered allies choosing to remain silent.
For example, in 2021 when Asian Americans demanded #StopAsianHate, Jewish organizations stood with them, attending marches and releasing public statements. Two years later, when antisemitic incidents in the U.S. are up 388 percent, organizations such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice, The Asian American Foundation, and OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates have said and done little. They have issued press releases on artificial intelligence and gun violence in the past six weeks, but have not condemned antisemitic attacks on American soil or elsewhere. In academia, I was told confidentially by at least one scholar that he will not condemn antisemitism publicly because he fears the backlash and “mob mentality” from his peers.
That is the most palpable way the groundwork for a Holocaust gets laid: fear. Make people afraid to speak out and speak up. Make them fear the consequences. Make them fear they will be ostracized, mobbed, condemned or lose their professional or personal reputations. Make people feel they must go along with the mob in order to belong. Make the enthusiasm for violence feel so overwhelming, euphoric and justified that you feel compelled to join. That, ultimately, makes a Holocaust possible.
It’s important to reiterate that there are many differences between our current decade and the 1930’s, and historical analogies can conceal as much as they reveal. What most distinguishes the present from that past is that we still have choices. The past is not prologue; we can control what happens from here. It is not predestined that the Holocaust will happen again, and I remain optimistic that it will not. But we should never delude ourselves to think that it can’t happen. The past few week have shown us that the threat is always with us.
After the war, the German Catholic writer Eugen Kogon, who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald, wrote a report on what he had seen and heard in the concentration camps. The report eventually became a book, published in 1950, called The Theory and Practice of Hell, in which Kogon systematically lays out the words, ideas and actions that contributed to the most horrific crimes humanity ever perpetrated on each other. He concludes the book with a warning that is as stark now as it was 73 years ago:
“The system of the SS state must be combated, so that any resurgence in our midst, whether by our aid or because of our silence, may be prevented. With all present knowledge at our command, there is no excuse left for anyone.”
May his words continue to empower all people around the world to stand up and speak out against hate wherever it may be.
Have a good week,
-JS
hmm. Illuminating, unfortunately.