The N-word

On Hamas and Hitler comparisons

I’m so old I can remember two versions of the Internet’s Hitler debate rule.

The first was that the longer any given debate on the internet continued, the probability that Hitler would be invoked—regardless of topic or scope—approached one. The second rule was simpler, and probably designed to stop the first from having its merry way with online discussions: the first person to make a Hitler comparison—or even to mention Hitler—loses the argument.

Needless to say, given events in the last week, Nazi comparisons have been coming thick and fast. Outside of narrow obsessives on this issue—before Saturday and Sunday—the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood probably held the moral high ground. This was in large part because they are so outgunned: a developing-world statelet up against a militarily powerful, developed-world regional hegemon.

Since then, that moral high ground has been swept away in global revulsion at—and condemnation of—Hamas’s atrocities in southern Israel. The irony, of course, is that Hamas shot and distributed most of the appalling videos and photographs itself: they emerged first on Telegram, then migrated to Twitter and Tiktok. Other pro-Palestinians in the Arab and wider Islamic world took them up, and they were soon across all social media.

The gleeful delight in death and destruction among both perpetrators and bystanders led to all manner of Nazi comparisons. Neither Hitler debate rule seemed to apply.

Be careful with those historical resonances, Ahmed

However, once again, the Nazi comparison does not hold, or, rather, if it does, it does so only in a very narrow sense.

I’m afraid, gentle readers, that Hamas is worse.

Key to understanding the Holocaust is understanding the extent to which the Nazis sneaked around when carrying it out. They did not want folks back home in the Vaterland to know what was being done in their name. Of course, people did find out (a bit). Even pre-war there was an understanding in Germany that concentration camps were places of horror if not extermination.

The law reflected this desire for secrecy: no attempt was made to pass enabling legislation making it legal to murder Jews and Gypsies. Existing Weimar and German Empire laws remained on the books. Actual Nazi racial legislation there was, in plenty—think the Nuremberg race laws—but as people noted at the time, it tended to resemble Jim Crow. It was hard for the US in particular to get on its moral high horse over the Nuremberg laws. The only countries that could were in Western Europe—France had its universalist laïcité, while Britain had used its navy to see off the slave trade.

Part of the Nuremberg laws—this aspect directed to working out who counted as Jewish and who didn’t, and who could marry whom

When it came to actual extermination, the relevant camps were deliberately located in rural Poland. Although German-officered, most death camp guards were not German and couldn’t even speak (well) to local Poles (while Ukrainian and Polish do have overlapping vocabularies, Latvian and Polish do not). Once again—as in Germany—Polish villagers did find out, although they sometimes misunderstood what they saw. This meant the information that got to the Western Allies via the Polish Resistance was both alarming and hard to confirm.

There was, however, a narrow, short-lived exception to Hitler’s wider attempt to hide his regime’s crimes. It occurred primarily in Ukraine. It involved a small number of German troops and a somewhat larger number of Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian collaborators. It does bear comparison with Hamas, and people who’ve raised the Einsatzgruppen in light of the weekend’s atrocities do have a point.

Einsatzgruppen means “service groups”. True to Nazi form the name hid their actual purpose. If you stop by a German Realschule even today, you will find einsatz used to describe hospitality courses.

There were four Einsatzgruppen, imaginatively named A, B, C, and D; in total there were about 3,000 members. They were tasked with killing as many Jews and Communist officials as they could as soon as possible after Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—commenced on 22 June 1941.

What followed is sometimes referred to as “the Holocaust of bullets”. Its most infamous single incident was a September 1941 massacre at Babi Yar, located in Kyiv’s outer suburbs. Of course—being so few in number—the four Einsatzgruppen had to call on local help: help that was, I’m afraid, often forthcoming.

In the course of killing roughly one-and-a-half million people, members of the Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators went, well, bonkers. Himmler—consistent with Nazi policy—had issued orders forbidding any photographs of any killings. He was to be disobeyed thousands of times over.

The photographs and occasional films the Einsatzgruppen and their friends took have a hi mum, it’s Viktor here, regards to dad, aren’t I great? vibe that Hamas’s gleeful killers also radiate. A significant percentage of both groups were and are thoroughly pleased with themselves and wanted/want the world to know about it.

“The Last Jew in Vinnitsia” is written on the back. Note the deliberate staging—the Einsatzgruppen were supposed to kill in groups, with longarms (so as to occlude personal responsibility).

Occasionally, there was a clash between the morally deranged behaviour evinced across Ukraine in particular and the German home front. Einsatzgruppen troops would be sent home to Germany on furlough, or German-speaking Ukrainians would turn up to work in a local factory. These people started talking in pubs and cafes.

Often, however, Germans found out what was going on because soldiers would bring entire rolls of film depicting nothing but massacres in to their local pharmacy to be developed. Sometimes, an unaware chemist—appalled at what floated up towards him out of the fixer—would call the police.

From a roll of film taken into the Munich equivalent of Boots in 1941.

It is a historical commonplace to note that one reason Himmler and his confreres moved away from mass shootings towards mass gassings was because the former sent Germany’s killers around the bend. However, around the bend didn’t just mean “psychologically wrecked, unable to function, wracked with guilt”. It also meant “excessive enthusiasm, proud of the cruelty”. Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, finished up firing off orders left and right to prevent his men from engaging in brutal violence and taking pictures of the lot. This meant outright bans on participation by “overzealous” killers.

After Heydrich and Himmler moved Holocaust operations to Poland, this extraordinary photographic record came to an end. Yes, there are photos of death camps—mainly the front gate, occasionally a watchtower, the ramp at Auschwitz—but the hi mum look at me ultraviolence is gone. The Nazi terror-state went back to covering its tracks.

It is legitimate to compare Hamas with the Einsatzgruppen, but not with other Nazi killers. The gleeful, brutal pride we’ve all seen across social and conventional media in the last week represents humanity at such a nadir that even Hitler, our contemporary folk-devil, struggles to provide a useful comparator.

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Note: the best archive of photographs of the type discussed in this piece appears in a 1988 German book, Schöne Zeiten—Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer, which I see has now been translated into English as The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders.

Housekeeping: there is another aspect to this issue that requires a separate piece, and that is the role of academic postcolonial theory and decolonisation in both justifying and celebrating what has taken place. It will appear in due course, once I’ve thought about it a bit more.