The name “Auschwitz” has become emblematic of the entire Nazi project: a totalitarian empire which planned to exterminate the Jews and the Roma, and to persecute, enslave and murder anyone classified as inferior to the Germanic Master Race.
All this did happen at Auschwitz, but it didn’t begin there. Nor was Auschwitz the only site of these events. And it could not have existed without foundations that were laid much earlier.
In late 19th- and early 20th-century eastern and central Europe, empires collapsed and were replaced by nation states. Their borders were established, often by force, and the people within them declared to be single nations, even though they actually contained diverse peoples, with different languages, histories and cultures.
In 1879 the German politician, Wilhelm Marr, founded the League of Antisemites to combat what he imagined was a mortal threat to the German “race” posed by the Jews. This was the first use of the term antisemitism, which would become a fundamental plank of Nazi ideology.
The Nazis persecuted many other groups, too, including Black, Gay, and Slavic people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, trade unionists, communists, Freemasons and so-called “asocials”, but they singled out the Jews and the Gypsies for extermination. The industrial-scale murder of these two peoples had its origins in Aktion T4, a euthanasia programme that started in 1939, developing techniques for mass killing of disabled people who the Nazis defined as “life unworthy of life”.
The barracks, gas chambers, crematoria and transport were designed and implemented by educated economists, architects, engineers and administrators – an efficient system of mass murder that used existing industrial techniques and systems in a functioning capitalist economy.
This wasn’t unique to Germany, even then. Fascism’s violent ethno-nationalism, authoritarianism, terror and gangsterism, can arise anywhere. In 1933, when the Nazis had just come to power in Germany, leading member of the Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, Henryk Erlich, warned that, in the appropriate circumstances, “Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.” He said, presciently, of the movement led by far-right Zionist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose inheritors are in power in Israel today, enacting a genocide: “[T]he only thing missing in order for them to become the same beasts is some muscle strength, some territory, and a political opportunity.”
In February 1935, years before Hitler’s Final Solution, a leading British fascist, Arnold Leese, wrote: “…the most certain and permanent way of disposing of the Jews would be to exterminate them by some humane method such as the lethal chamber.”
Before Holocaust Memorial Day was established, commemorations were usually held on 19th April, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. At these, the focus was not on death, but on resistance, both physical resistance and the quiet heroism of those who organised clandestine schools, literary events, soup kitchens, libraries and underground newspapers, under the noses of the Nazi occupiers.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they terrorised the population, separating Jews and non-Jews, stripping Jews of their rights and forcing them into ghettoes. Earlier in the 1930s, the Jewish anti-fascist resistance to Poland’s home-grown far right were mainly Bundists, but in the ghetto Bundists, left-wing Zionists and Communists – formed a united resistance. Women comprised up to one-third of the physical resistance, and several courageous women in hiding outside the ghetto were couriers, passing messages, finding families to hide Jewish children, procuring arms, liaising with non-Jewish Polish resisters.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted for nearly a month, carried out by a few hundred starved and weakened fighters, aged between 13 and 43. The Nazis defeated them but paid a heavy price, and news of it inspired uprisings in other ghettoes, and even in concentration camps and death camps.
As Jewish socialists today, we take particular inspiration from the Bundist Marek Edelman, Second in Command of the Uprising. A socialist, an anti-Zionist, an internationalist and anti-nationalist all his life, he said of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “We fought for dignity and freedom not for territory or a national identity.”
The destruction of Jewish and Roma lives in Europe could not have been achieved by the Nazis alone. They needed both active collaborators and passive indifference. The other side of the coin is that people who did survive only did so thanks to non-Jews who risked everything to help them.
This is still true. Donald Trump is unleashing murderous fascist-style forces against his own citizens, but masses of Americans are finding the courage to defend their diverse communities.
As we become inured to watching violence enacted by states against innocent, powerless people, and genocide is a topic of daily discussion, all racism, including antisemitism and the kind of conspiracy theories that fuelled Nazism are being confidently expressed in the public domain. The political misuse, distortion or caricaturing of Holocaust history – by numerous parties, including the Israeli government – has had a devastating effect on our ability to understand and resist the new rise of the far right. It has undermined trust and empathy, so that instead of supporting each other, targeted groups see themselves in competition. Pitting genocides against each other in an Oppression Olympics or characterising histories of oppression as “belonging” solely to atomised groups of victims, sabotages the solidarity we need to challenge them.
This is a dangerous moment. While the storm rages, most people don’t fall neatly into clear categories of victim or perpetrator, challenger or witness. As ruthless, racist political leaders dismantle democratic mechanisms and trash legal rights and protections today, how we understand and memorialise our shared history will inform how effectively we challenge the far right and fascism now.