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Genocide and war as a civilizing foundation
sacrifice
By Victor and Victoria Trimondi
In the academic debate about
national-socialism as a “political religion”, there has been since some
years a discussion in which the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” has
been characterized in terms of a full ritual sacrifice carried out by the
Nazis by means of the Holocaust. The two religious political scientists
Michael Ley and Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch in particular have brought this
theory into the debate, both relying on the French sociologist of religion
René Girard.
For Girard, who is in the
tradition of the religious philosophers Georges Bataille and Rudolf Otto,
sacredness and violence have a conditional relationship. On the one hand
there are the horror, the fear and fascination of the faithful, and on the
other the cruelty, arbitrariness and wrath of the gods, which characterize
the "sacred", the defining "primal urge" on which every
religion is based.
Using numerous ethnological
examples, Girard comes to the conclusion that there is always a
collectively perpetrated human sacrifice, which creates the basis for the
cultural foundation of a religion. Only through a jointly committed murder,
Girard writes, could the tribal members be united in one “original religious
experience”. The sacrifice thus had a “propitiatory function” for the
perpetrators, who made peace with each other after the completion of the
deed. By a killing in which each takes part in collective murder, the whole
congregation spills the blood of the sacrifice. This results in the
participants’ feeling a pregnant and oscillating mixture of crime and
conspiracy, guilt and obligation, violence and satisfaction, terror and
fascination that bring the murderous cult action a numinous aura of holiness.
Through the collective murder, writes Girard, the partnership brings into
being its internal stability, its continuation and order, not least because
it projects its violence outward: “It is the function of sacrifice to
appease internal violence and to prevent the outbreak of conflict.” (1) It
protects the community (all against all) from its own violence, and by
deriving this to an outside victim (the “scapegoat”), it guarantees the
protection of social peace and may therefore provide cultural services. Human
sacrifice is thus, in the form of a “sacred original murder”, a
culture-creating event. It is Girard’s thesis that culture thus develops
out of the shedding of the blood of others.
Thus, once committed, the “original
murder” continues to exercise its stabilizing social functions, and must “survive”
in the memory of later generations. It continues to exist as myth, symbol
and ritual, says Girard, within the cultural fabric created with its help,
but now the cultural foundation sacrifice no longer manifests clearly. It
requires an aura of mystery, the secretive, the half-conscious: “The sacrifice
is shrouded in mystery [....] Even today the mystery of sacrifice is as
impenetrable as ever.” (2) Just this impenetrability makes it
"sacred" and its constructive force is derived from this. Myth,
symbol and ritual relocate it to an otherworldly space that is ever
present.
The “Final Solution of the
Jewish Question” realizes to a great extent the above four criteria of
Girard’s foundation sacrifice; “collectively committed murder, scapegoat,
terror, and secrecy.” There was complete clarity among the executors about
the extent of the terror. Himmler himself indicated several times how
monstrous the extermination of the Jews was. In a speech in Poznan on October 4th
1943 he defined very precisely the horror in which his SS men had to carry
out their commands: “Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are
lying there, when there are 500, and when there are 1000. To have gone
through this and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have
remained decent, that has made us hard.” (3) Josef Goebbels wrote in
relation to the deportations in his diary that “barbaric methods not more
precisely to be described were employed, and of the Jews themselves not
much is left.” (4) Such statements, by no means isolated, show that the
executors were fully aware of the terrible reality to an extent that was
hardly true for the majority of Germans.
For them the “Terror” came to
awareness as something mysterious, ambiguous, something hidden as a
presentiment an ambivalence that, according to Girard, is almost necessary
for mythologizing the murder of a man in the foundation sacrifice.
Paradoxical as it may sound, it was not the open participation of the “German
national community” in the atrocities, but the widespread superficial
knowledge of it, the veils, the disguises and the ambiguities, which could
allow “sacralisation” of the murders to act in the creation of a culture
after a victorious war. (5) In a
striking sentence, the historian David Bankier has described this twilight
zone of knowledge, half-knowledge and non-knowledge in the German
population: The Germans “knew enough to know that it is better if you do
not know more.” (6) Thus, the confidentiality of the murder of the Jews as
carried out by the relevant authorities and the SS never could be and
indeed should not be fully maintained for rational reasons but for creating
the right atmosphere to let the Germans take part in the mass murder as a
“mystery”. As Himmler knew, the collective sacrifice had to be shrouded in
secrecy, and on the 4th October 1943 in a speech to SS Group Leaders he
called the murder of the Jews a “never written and never to be written page
of glory in our history”. (7) The Reichsführer-SS consistently followed the
principle of not specifically mentioning the mass murder in documents and
always used euphemisms when he came to speak of it.
So Michael Ley, in his book Genocide and the Expectation of
Salvation, comes to the conclusion that for the Nazis the mass murder
of the Jews demonstrated a “sacred act of sacrifice”. Thanks to this
collectively performed “blood sacrifice”, the “Aryan race” would experience
its sacralization. “The extermination camps were the sacred shrines of
National Socialism, in which the holy rites of human sacrifice were
consummated,” writes Ley. “National Socialism and myth have an identical
reality: the cult of sacrifice. Human sacrifice is the reconciling
principle with God [....] These performances of National Socialism do not
have the exclusive character of mass manipulation, but can in some sense be
understood as 'politico-religious worship' as well. The Eucharistic act is
no longer completed 'symbolically.' The Nazi religion celebrates the rite
in reality with human sacrifice performed in institutions of extermination.
This sacrifice is atonement and intended creation at the same time.” (8)
The consensus of the “killers” would have had the structuring force, to “sacralise”
Aryan racial theory and anchor it as a “religion” or as “orthodoxy”.
Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch puts forward a similar thesis. The “Jewish sacrifice”
of the Nazis was a means for them “to engage supernatural forces in a
favorable manner so that they alter the causal history of the world in
favor of the sacrificers or their desires [....].” (9) Thus, the act of
sacrifice would be in a largely secular society, as despite its religious
tendencies, National Socialism still was, the means to conjure up the
presence of the archaic gods (the “supernatural forces.”)
Jointly committed murder, the
scapegoat, the horror of the atrocities and deeds clouded in mystery would
have provided the structuring force of an archaic National Socialist
culture and religion founded on a final victory of the Nazis in the extermination
of the Jews. “The death of the Jews, carried out by the Aryans, so the
central thesis of my assessment of the mass murder of the Jews, is in the
phenomenology of the inner vision of Hitler [....] a sacrificium,” Bärsch
writes. “This kind of religiosity has a magical component, insofar as it
believes the magician to manipulate supernatural forces through his own
actions for the purpose of influencing earthly causal trends [....] My
thesis is that this form of magical religiosity has been the condition for
the decision of the mass murder of the Jews. [....] For the sake of their
[the Nazis] own salvation, the Jews are victimized in the sense of a
sacrificium. [....] With the destruction of the Jews, Hitler wanted the
will of the Almighty to be executed and to gain His favor. He believed in a
causal nexus between people and supernatural forces for the configuration
of a magical religiosity, in which, from the perspective of the
perpetrators, the killing of the enemy has the character of a sacred ritual.”(10)
Both authors, Ley and Bärsch,
refer back not only to the Passion of Christ, but especially to the
Apocalypse of John, in their etiology of this gigantic ritual sacrifice of
the Jews. In addition to this, the Western history of pogroms in which sacrificial
thought always played a role is evoked. Nevertheless, a direct causal
connection to Christian dogma is not conclusive. The crucifixion of Christ
is “self-sacrifice” and not a “sacrifice of the alien”, as in the extermination of the Jews. While
infidels will be destroyed in the Apocalypse of John, this is not
explicitly considered as a sacrificium. In this respect, the two Indian
mythological texts, the Mahabharata
and the Bhagavad Gita, are
totally unique. In them, in imitation of the Vedic tradition, the “human
sacrifice” is described as a sacred primary event, and in the sacred
sacrificial theory war as such is also included.
Thus holy war and sacrifice in
the Mahabharata are identical. In
many parts of the epic this equation is addressed directly. “The statement
that the battle was a sacrificial feast occurs frequently, and many images,
too, show parallels with the battlefield, from simple metaphors to
scholastically conducted parables, whether about personal sacrifice or
advice about sacrifice”, Heino Gehrts writes in his analysis of the Indian
heroic poem. (11) A recurring image is the “libation”, the liquid sacrifice
expressing the bleeding to death of entire crowds of warriors. The fighters
themselves are referred to as “sacrificial fire” or “sacrificial animals,”
the dismembered bodies are the sacrificial embers or “fuel” for the fire
sacrifice. “Body parts, body hills are considered to be shared sacrificial
butter, [....], so, regarded as the strewn remains of a sacrifice, or as an
extinct sacrificial fire, the earth of the battlefield is often called the
altar.”(12) In one passage it is said of a hero: he “has made all
preparations to celebrate the sacrifice, has submitted to the initiation of
the slaughter, and at the end, as he poured out his life as a libation into
the fire of sacrifice shown by his enemies, he ritually completed his
sacrifice with a [bloody] completion bathe.” (13) The battle reaches its
climax as Bima, the mighty warrior, capturing an enemy, puts his foot on
his neck and tears his chest open with both hands. Then he drinks the
living spouting liquid gulp by gulp. He addresses the petrified bystanders
with bloodied mouth: “Soon I will fulfill the second vow and kill the other
cattle [meaning Duryodana, the leader of the opposition Kurus] in this
armed sacrificial feast.” (14) The beneficiaries of this gruesome sacrifice
are the Indian gods. They feed from the life juices of slain warriors. This
is an ancient Indo-Aryan tradition of the Kshatriya caste. “Beings exist
from food/ Food is brought into being by rain/ Rain from sacrifice/ And
sacrifice is brought into being by Action/ Know that ritual action
originates in Brahman (the Vedas)/ And Brahman arises from the
Imperishable/ Therefore the all-pervading Brahman/ Is eternally established
in sacrifice,” we read in the Bhagavad
Gita (III song, 14 - 15) Stated plainly that means “without sacrifice
no gods.”
Based on the logic of sacrifice
demonstrated in the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, the Second World War
appears as a giant “sacrificial feast” including the burning of Jews with
the ulterior intention of evoking the “return of the archaic gods”.
Revitalized by the “sacrificial butter” of the fallen and burnt, the final
victory awaited by the Nazis’ barbaric deities could reappear from the
early Aryan era. The call for them was to be heard at the beginning of the
30s: “When the time is fulfilled that the old gods return and the spirits
of the ancient world take office,” wrote Friedrich Hielscher in 1932, “then
the order of the nations will break, and what is high will fall, and what
is in the depths will arise [....] Here the forces of antiquity will live
again; here will gather that which has grown over thousands of years, here
the flow of time will halt, here the ancient prophecies will be
fulfilled.... .“ (15) Many years before the Holocaust the Ariosophist Lanz
von Liebenfels had recognized the causal nexus of human sacrifice and the
renaissance of the gods, and recommended that members of inferior races be “burnt”
as a “divine sacrifice.” (!). In a hymn he promises the Aryan goddess
Frauja: “Then you will have fine oblations, then the Schrättling [Jew] will
be your altar fire.” (16) Mindful of the seven dead who died during a failed
assassination attempt on Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, the Völkische Beobachter newspaper wrote
about a subsequent mass meeting on 12 November 1939: “Ten thousand men and
women stand before the altar of the movement among the smoldering flames of
the sacrificial fire, to lend their hearts and their voices to the
complaint.” (17)
After a Nazi victory in World
War II the two “blood sacrifices” (extermination of the Jews and the
millions of dead on the battlefield) would probably have been “sacralised”
and the German soldiers who returned home described as “holy warriors” and
as Kshatriya. From the outset the entire Nazi system tended, even if only
half-consciously, in this religious direction. In 1934, Alfred Rosenberg
had written, mindful of the First World War. “The dead of the war are
[....] the martyrs of a new day, a new faith. The blood that died begins to
come alive. In its mystical character a new construction of the German
national soul lies ahead.”(18) Nothing could have demonstrated for the
Nazis the renewed supremacy of the Aryans over other races better than a
victorious war. After the “final victory” the “death and blood mysticism”
would have increased to gigantic proportions. The shot, the murdered, the
dismembered and burned of the Second World War were the bloodiest of all
foundation sacrifices on which the “Kshatriya caste” had built their temple
of a cruel Aryan “world religion,” and whose elite had gathered in the “Black
Order” of the SS.
References:
(1)
René Girard - Das Heilige und die
Gewalt - Zürich 1987, 27
(7)
Spiegel 33/2001, 133
(8)
Michael Ley – Genozid und Heilserwartung - Zum nationalsozialistischen Mord am
europäischen Judentum – Wien 1995, 208/ 211
(9) Claus E. Bärsch – Die
politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus - München 1998, 377
(11) Heino Gehrts - Mahabharata
- Das Geschehen und seine Bedeutung - Bonn 1975, 235
(12) Heino Gehrts - Mahabharata - Das Geschehen und seine
Bedeutung - Bonn 1975, 236
(15)
Friedrich Hielscher – "Die Heraufkunft der Kräfte" – in - Stecowa, - Phantastisches und
Übersinnliches aus dem Weltkrieg – Berlin 1932, 195.
(17)
In: Volker Ackermann - Nationale
Totenfeiern in Deutschland: Von Wilhelm I. bis Franz Joseph Strauß. Eine
Studie zur politischen Semiotik - Stuttgart 1990, 171
(18)
Alfred Rosenberg - Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der
seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit - München 1940, 23
See: Heinrich Himmler: The Nazi Hindu
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