Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.  

How Murder of the Other Ends in Self-Destruction

Whilst an adversary is often accorded respect and even admiration, an enemy is always despised and frequently demonized. Because an enemy, unlike an opponent, is not merely set against us, but seen as fundamentally alien and other - culturally, morally, and even physically; they look repulsive and they smell bad. 

This long and shameful tradition of depicting our enemies as monstrous and inhuman - enemies who can never be defeated and assimilated into our world, only exterminated like vermin - is nowhere better illustrated than in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which displays an irrational (at times insane) level of racial hatred. What we might term the metaphysics of enmity clearly acted as the murderous dynamic of National Socialism, as well as the indispensable precondition that made genocide not only inevitable but, for many Germans, acceptable. 

Of course this hatred might be contextualized within the religious, cultural and social history of Germany. But it's never fully explained by placing it within such a context. For there is something else - something almost incomprehensible - about Nazi anti-Semitism for those who do not share this obsessive mania and the Final Solution results from a mystical as well as an ideological and biological fantasy to do with health, strength, and purity.

Ironically, of course, the idea of a master race is inconceivable without the Jews being assigned their role as the eternal Other whom it is necessary to annihilate, in order that the Aryan superman might live. But there is a further fatal irony all the time unfolding here: for this murderous fantasy is as suicidal as it is homicidal and war becomes not simply a means of eliminating a mortal enemy, but of regenerating one’s own blood via self-sacrifice. Ultimately, Hitler is as happy to shed the blood of those he promised to protect, as those he desired to exterminate. Indeed, it might even be argued that the objective of the Nazi Regime was not really the demonization and destruction of the Jews, but the idealization and subsequent sacrifice of the German people themselves.

In a brilliantly insightful passage, Michel Foucault writes:

      "The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one’s life, being exposed to total destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism’s policies. It had to reach the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly constitute itself as superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever.

      We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized bio-power in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms … coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: the Nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.”

- Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 259-60.

And this is why the Third Reich ends not only with the Final Solution, but also the infamous Nero Decree [Nerobefehl] in which Hitler calls for the total destruction of German infrastructure in the face of impending defeat and occupation, regardless of the consequences to the population.

eBay and the Question of Holocaust Memoribilia

Image: BSkyB

The mock-horror and fake outrage that greeted the news that online auction site eBay does good business selling mementos from the Holocaust was, of course, all-too-predictable. 

When will the editors of The Mail on Sunday simply admit that such trade - just like child pornography - is inevitable in a free market in which, as Marx pointed out long ago, all values are resolved into exchange value and all objects and events are commodified and given price tags.

Capitalism doesn't care about respecting the memory of the dead anymore than it cares about the rights of the living. It is systematically amoral and inhuman: everything is permissible. To paraphrase Marx once more, under capitalism all the sensitive bonds and small kindnesses that tie us together are dissolved until all that's left is shameless greed, naked self-interest, and callous cash payment. 

Money is substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and the possibility of living a good life. And whilst love of money may not be the root of all evil, it certainly doesn't seem to encourage ethical behaviour. And so it is that traders have no qualms about adding a small bar code beneath the yellow Star of David attached to the striped uniforms of death camp inmates.

It's a financial solution to the awkward question of genocide: what shall we do with the remains? Nazis everywhere will be smiling ...