Hi Donny. Thanks for talking to us. Could you start by briefly introducing yourself?
My name is Donny Gluckstein. I’m a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Scotland, and I’m working together with another comrade called Henry Maitles on a book about the Holocaust. It’s due to come out next year sometime and has the working title Never Again! The Holocaust and its disputes.
People in Germany maybe know you best because you and Janey Stone recently brought out the book: The Radical Jewish Tradition.
Yeah, that’s right. The German version—Die radikale jüdische Tradition—is now also available.
The Holocaust is a big subject. What exactly are you wanting to look at?
The subject in history that has the most written about it is the Holocaust, and that’s for a good reason, in terms of just the scale of it—the sheer horror and the calculated murder that it involved. It carries on being important because of its size, but also because of the way that it is used by Israel, America, and German Staatsräson to justify a new genocide.
Even though a lot has been written about the Holocaust, I don’t think that the book which we need has been written about what it was, and how it’s been used.
There’s been a lot of books about the Holocaust. What could you add that’s not been written already?
The Holocaust has been documented in fantastic detail, and that’s partly because of the campaigns by the Left to actually expose it. In Germany 1968 was a key turning point where people actually said: “You can’t brush the Holocaust away, you can’t hide it. You can’t have ex-Nazis right through the structures of German institutions, both of state and private industry. We need to confront our parents.”
Very, very rarely is there anything that understands the cause of the Holocaust within German society, and the development of Nazism within that society. In other words, there needs to be a Marxist analysis of the Holocaust itself, and of what has happened since. While the book is primarily about the Holocaust, it also looks at how it’s been misused and abused.
Was the Holocaust logical? What was the benefit of the mass industrial extermination of whole races?
This is a very good question. In a sense, a starting point is to take it back to the Nazi motivation in what seems to be an absolutely pointless exercise. I’ll go back to Hitler’s last words in his testament, when he’s about to blow his brains out. He says: “Resist the poisoner of all nations—international Jewry.” He had this obsession about a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy.
Of course, it’s absolute nonsense, but if you look at the German Revolution in 1918, Hitler feels that he is carrying out the counter-revolution by exterminating the Jews. It doesn’t make any sense, but there is a twisted logic to what he is doing.
Comparisons are difficult, but people ask the question: “Why?” The recent UN report brought ít out. Why is it that the Israelis are spending lots and lots of money and technology finding means of shooting individual Palestinian children, sometimes at the mother’s breast?
You can say there is no logic to it. But there is a logic. There’s a class logic to what they are doing. They want to show the power of the Israeli state to exterminate anybody they want. They want to boost their arms sales. They want to show the ability within the Middle East that they can dominate.
In other words, there is a horrible class logic to what Hitler was doing. And when people say there’s no sense at all, then it makes it incomprehensible. Saying that the Holocaust makes no sense reduces it to something that happened in the past with this mad, crazy man called Adolf Hitler. That’s a common way of walking away from the class analysis and the Marxist analysis of history.
So you see a connection between the Holocaust and capitalism?
There is a connection. It’s not a direct connection. As you trace the development of the Holocaust, it’s a mistake to believe in intentionalism—to say that in 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he already had the idea of Auschwitz in his head. He didn’t, and the German establishment didn’t.
In 1924, they had the idea of the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy, but at that stage, the plan was to make Germany Judenfrei, to drive the Jews out of Germany. And as soon as Hitler gets into power, he starts taking measures against Jews, which makes the pressure increasingly great. But that doesn’t explain the Holocaust.
The other important thing to say is that the Holocaust and the Final Solution are not exactly the same. The Final Solution addresses the question from the Wannsee Conference in 1942, which was solely about the Jews. But the Holocaust itself is a much bigger thing.
I won’t spend much more time on this because I’ll return to the Jews. But it’s very interesting to note that the whole technology of the gas chamber was developed through Aktion T4 against disabled non-Jewish German people. They dated it from the 1st of September 1939, the first day of the war.
One thing I didn’t know as I started the research is that the people who set up the gas chambers, who gassed the little children because they were “useless”, were employed under the same terms and conditions to carry out the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Treblinka and all of the death camps. In other words, the technology was transferred directly to that. If you classify the Holocaust itself as gas chambers, it didn’t start on Jews, but on disabled Germans.
At the same time, the Final Solution is the major element of the Holocaust. People talk about anything up to 10 million dead. Six million of them were Jews—the majority. So the question of the Jews is a central part of the story, but not the whole story. It is important to say that because Israel, Yad Vashem, and all the rest of it insist that the Holocaust only happened to Jews.
But let’s go back to the development of the Final Solution. It came out of a long process. The beginning of it was Kristallnacht in 1938. Germany is rearming. They are short of cash, and they make a decision to Aryanise. They said we need to get an injection of cash by robbing everything that the wealthy Jews have, although the majority of Jews are not wealthy.
A couple of weeks before Kristallnacht, they cancel all Jewish passports. You cannot emigrate with your assets. Kristallnacht is a mass orgy of violence. 30,000 Jews are thrown into concentration camps. Two days after that, they bring in a law that says that you can get out, but you can’t take your assets with you.
If you look at the pace of what’s happening, it took 5½ years for about 120,000 Jews to leave Germany, and that’s under Hitler. In the 10 months after Kristallnacht, the same number left. In other words, there’s an accelerating process, and at this point it’s expropriation. You take the money and you drive them out.
Then it changes again. It’s still not deliberate extermination—Germany is getting towards being Judenfrei. But when the war breaks out, where does Germany first march into? It marches into Poland. And in Poland you have the largest concentration of Jews in the world. Three and a half million Jews live in Poland. The Germans split Poland with the Russians under the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the Western part, far from getting rid of the Jews, you’ve got large numbers of Jews.
So they come up with a new plan to have three zones. The Western zone, in conquered Poland and Eastern Europe, is exclusively German. You’re going to push out the Poles and the Jews. The next zone, the Generalgouvernement, has Poles in it. The final zone, the Lublin Reservation, will have the Jews pushed far into the East.
The plan is still to push Jews out. For technical reasons, the Lublin Reservation is not going to work. So the Nazis look at other alternatives. Where can we push Jews to? Madagascar comes up. All sorts of things come up as ideas, but they can’t be done.
In the meantime, Jews are being gathered together in the ghettos. Those ghettos are sources of mass deaths. Half a million people die simply through hunger and ill health. And then the Nazis come to the decision around 1941 to get rid of them by extermination.
This is when the Final Solution comes into operation. It’s a whole series of steps. But behind it all was the counter-revolutionary intent: “Jews, Bolsheviks—they’re the same thing. We have to defeat them.”
To go back to your original question: what was the logic? Hitler actually believed that killing young babies and women and old men was a means of winning the war. I know it makes no sense, but that is it.
In the same way that capitalism is an illogical system, it makes no sense to have continuous crises. Does that mean there is no rationality to capitalism? Absolutely not. There’s a total rationality to capitalism. It produces irrational conclusions, and the same goes for the Nazis and their counter-revolutionary program.
Maybe it’s worth saying at this point, which you do cover in The Radical Jewish Tradition, that the creation of ghettos did not go unresisted.
Oh, absolutely! That’s a whole other story. There’s resistance all the way through. But the focus of what we’re working on now is to look at the worst side of the Holocaust, rather than the radical Jews and the radical Left fighting back.
Let’s move to Germany after the Holocaust. In 1945, you’ve got two Germanys. How did the different Germanys deal with the Holocaust?
Let’s start with the Allies first of all. The Allies have conquered Germany and Austria—because remember that was part of Hitler’s Reich—and their initial plan is punishment. In the West, they had the Morgenthau Plan, which said that Germany has caused two World Wars; we must make sure that Germany can’t cause a third world war. So what we’ll do is deindustrialise and denazify. We’ll punish the people that carried this out.
Then the Cold War really kicks in. You can see signs of it even before Potsdam. As soon as that takes place, the Morgenthau Plan is thrown out because what they want to do is construct a new successful Western-style capitalist Germany.
How are you going to staff the ministries? How are you going to run the businesses? You need the people who were running the ministries and the businesses previously. They happened to be Nazis, and so if you look at Adenauer’s Germany, it was stuffed full of Nazis.
I forget the exact figure, but around 80% of judges and prosecutors were Nazis, or had been Nazis. They didn’t say they were Nazis, but they comprised two-fifths or three-fifths of the foreign ministry. It was stuffed with Nazis.
The approach in the West was to reconstruct the state, and to take Nazis. It was a whitewashing operation called denazification. You probably know the famous story: you go to court wearing brown shirts, you come out and you now have a white shirt.
When they captured the files of Nazi party membership, there were 11 million people on it, which is a lot of people. Something like 200,000 or 250,000 people were actually involved in carrying out the Holocaust itself. Out of that entire process, only 165 were charged and sentenced for carrying out murder. That shows you what was going on.
In Western Germany, it’s a cover-up, plus reparations to Israel to cover your tracks, which had nothing to do with the Holocaust. In the East, it’s completely different because in the East, the Stalinists had the KPD and the personnel with whom they could start the state. They still occasionally turned a blind eye, but they were able to say: “We are anti-Nazi.” Part of the ideological battle with the West is to say: “We are dealing with the Nazis. We’re the genuine article. They are fake.”
In Eastern Germany, they put a lot more people on trial. They executed a lot more people. However, their emphasis was not on Jews or the Holocaust. The emphasis was on the fight against fascism, which is fine. The KPD suffered massively and they fought heroically against fascism through the German resistance.
The problem is that their analysis is not a class analysis. It sounds like it is. But they said that capitalism is a fascist system. You have this in 1968 when West Berlin student leader Rudi Dutschke said that we’ve been under 30 years of Fascism in Western Germany. There’s no real analysis of fascism. If fascism equals capitalism, it’s nonsense because you can’t identify where the real risks are coming from.
Part of our book is to completely debunk the East German approach to what fascism was. You need to understand it in Trotsky’s terms as a very specific type of counter-revolutionary movement.
These politics are important. As part of the Socialist Worker’ Party tradition we recognise East Germany as State Capitalist, not socialist. It means you can have that critical analysis of Eastern Germany. It’s an important starting principle, which makes it different from everything else that has been done.
One last question to bring things up to date. A lot of people today encounter the Holocaust in the context of Israel trying to justify genocide. Is there a danger that our side could forget the relevance of the Holocaust?
Absolutely. Probably the major motivation for writing this book is learning about the rise of the far right now, and how we fight them. There’s all sorts of arguments, but one of the very strongest is that we associate them with the Holocaust. People in Germany recognise this, as shown by the hundreds of thousands who turned out on demonstrations against the AfD,
It doesn’t matter how much they support Israel and claim that they’re not antisemitic. We say: “This is your tradition. This is where you will lead.” The fact that they are supporting a genocide now is proof of that.
The Holocaust is a very important argument in fighting the far right today. It’s one of our key weapons. It’s important analytically because you need to distinguish between people who are racist and get pulled in by the far right and the actual far right itself, with its Nazi background and its Nazi beliefs and its counter-revolutionary drive. There’s a lot of contemporary politics tied up with understanding the Holocaust.
