This was not the case with the Nazi treatment of the Jews. As Tony Judt puts it, “If we are not to wallow in helpless despair when it comes to explaining why it came to this, we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself.”73 For the Nazis, and for Hitler in particular, the demonization of the Jews, and implicitly their excision, was part and parcel of the regime’s millenarian vision of national salvation.74 Hitler described himself in July 1941 as “the Robert Koch of politics.” The Nazi dictator further explained the comparison: “He [Koch] found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow dealt to the Jews.”75
The most important pitfall of Courtois’ introduction is the fact that, by often turning a blind eye to these differences, his explanation for the flawed anamnesis regarding Communism’s criminality opened the door to dubious interpretations. He stated that “after 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. After initially disputing the unique nature of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, the communists soon grasped the benefits involved in immortalizing the Holocaust as a way of rekindling antifascism on a more systematic basis…. More recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world.”76 This is at best a distortion. As Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Jürgen Kocka, and other prominent historians have shown, it was only after 1970, or even after 1980, that the Holocaust became a central topic in the analysis and understanding of the Third Reich. The difficulties related to a recognition of Communist mass crimes are due to the long decades of state-controlled information in those countries, the belatedness of archival openings, and the nervous reaction of left-wing circles in Western Europe (especially in France, Greece, and Spain) to what they decry as a political instrumentalization of the past.
There were two types of reaction to Courtois’ argument. Reviewers such as Scammell, Judt, Bartov, and Herf admitted that he was justified to a certain extent. Jeffrey Herf, for example, argued that “despite some important exceptions, Courtois has a point: In Western academia, scholars who chose to focus on the crimes of communism were and remain a minority and face the career-blocking danger of being labeled as right-wingers.”77 But, as Scammel and Judt pointed out, this is not a reason for imposing a choice between “our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”78 The Black Book builds a successful and convincing case for the equation between Communism and radical evil, thus placing it in the same category as Fascism. And most recently, this position has been endorsed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and discussed in the EU Parliament, during the presentation of the Prague Declaration (signed by, among others, Václav Havel, Joachim Gauck, and Vytautas Landsbergis). For example, the OSCE’s “Resolution on Divided Europe Reunited: Promoting Human Rights and Civil Liberties in the OSCE Region in the Twenty-first Century” states:
Noting that in the twentieth century European countries experienced two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity, acknowledging the uniqueness of the Holocaust… The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly reconfirms its united stand against all totalitarian rule from whatever ideological background… Urges the participating States: a. to continue research into and raise public awareness of the totalitarian legacy; b. to develop and improve educational tools, programs and activities, most notably for younger generations, on totalitarian history, human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms, pluralism, democracy and tolerance;… Expresses deep concern at the glorification of the totalitarian regimes.79
Under the circumstances, one can hardly see the point in trying, as Courtois seemed to do (setting the tone for further rationalizations by others in later years), to appropriate the image of ultimate evil. His argument was turned into cannon fodder by those who wished to dismiss The Black Book altogether. French journalist Nicolas Weil emphatically declared at the time that the book was “an ideological war machine against the theory of the Shoah’s uniqueness” which “minimized the memory of the brown period.”80 One cannot agree with such political coloring of the Black Book, but the volume did indeed generate a war of numbers, words, and memories that sometimes, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, had direct or indirect negationist and normalizing tonalities. An implicit causal relationship was established between remembering Jewish suffering and “forgetting” the pain of others, thus setting up a new wave of anti-Semitism in the public sphere.81
The comparison between Communism and Nazism had been long sensitive in Russian, East European, and Western analyses. Courtois pointed to the disturbing writings of Vassily Grossman, the author of the novel Life and Fate, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature (and coauthor with Ilya Ehrenburg, in the aftermath of World War II, of The Black Book of Nazi Crimes against Soviet Jews, a terrifying report that the Stalinists banned).82 Both in that novel and in his shorter book Forever Flowing, Grossman insisted that the Stalinist destruction of the kulaks was fundamentally analogous to Nazi genocidal politics against groups considered racially inferior. The persecution and extermination of the Jews was as much a consequence of ideological tenets held sacred by the Nazi zealots as the destruction of the kulaks during Stalinist collectivization campaigns. One author with extensive knowledge of the Soviet archives argued, “It seems that Stalin and his henchmen believed in irredeemable, hopeless individuals who had to be eliminated no less than Hitler did.”83
CONSTRUCTING THE ENEMY
Millions of human lives were destroyed as a result of the conviction that the sorry state of mankind could be corrected if only the ideologically designated “vermin” were eliminated. This ideological drive to purify humanity was rooted in the scientistic cult of technology and the firm belief that History (always capitalized) had endowed the revolutionary elites (of extreme left or extreme right) with the mission to get rid of the “superfluous populations” (as Hannah Arendt put it). Communist regimes tried to permanently excise the segments of the society that it designated as potentially inimical to the realization of utopia. And, as Gerlach and Werth showed in the case of the Soviet Union, “the more defined and precise the Bolsheviks’ envisioned order became, the greater the number of those that were forcibly excluded from it.” In like manner, they created “a world of enemies, and ultimately there was no other solution to the threat that these imagined enemies posed than their total physical annihilation.” In this sense, the two authors conclude by stating that “mass terror was a Soviet variant of the ‘final solution.’”84 Historian Eric Weitz’s concept of racialization falls in the same category. He considered it useful in explaining the way Soviet authorities alternated the designation of population categories subjected to terror with direct consequences regarding their imprisonment, execution, deportation, and so on: “It helps capture the malleability of assigned identities, how groups perceived as nations or classes can, in specific historical circumstances, come to be viewed as so utterly distinct from the dominant groups that only the term race captures the immense divide that is created. And the term also captures how, in different circumstances, populations can become ‘deracialized,’ as happened officially to many of the purged nationalities after Josef Stalin’s death.”85