Mr. President and leaders of B’nai B’rith, I am grateful for the invitation to address you this evening. When one studies the Holocaust that took place during World War II in depth, one cannot help but think that if we had studied it thoroughly enough, perhaps the subsequent genocides would not have occurred because we would not have allowed them. Perhaps a million Cambodians and half a million Tutsis would still be alive. Perhaps Srebrenica or the “dirty war” would not have happened.
In recent years, there has been a surge in Holocaust historiography thanks to the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union, new computer-based research techniques, and new victims, perpetrators, and witnesses who are willing to share their testimonies. The new insights and interpretations of the Holocaust emerging from this research have shaken my traditional techno-optimism. One of the most important conclusions of recent years is that the Holocaust was not perpetrated by a fanatical minority but was a mass undertaking. For a long time, the myth was perpetuated that the Holocaust had been planned and carried out in secret by highly ideologized fanatical minorities without the knowledge or participation of the majority of German society. However, recent research has shown that the Holocaust had far more active and passive perpetrators than previously believed and far fewer opponents than it could have had.
One of the most influential studies was conducted by the American historian Christopher Browning, who investigated the behavior of the members of the 101st Auxiliary Police Battalion. The members of this battalion were middle-aged workers from Hamburg, many of whom were not members of the Nazi Party. During its years of service in Poland, this battalion was responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jewish civilians. The 101st Battalion is of interest to historians because it was one of the few in which the commander publicly authorized soldiers who wished to do so not to participate in the killings of civilians and announced that those who did so would face no punishment or reprisals. Only 13 of the 500 members of this battalion chose not to participate in the killings. Browning’s research was among the first to challenge the prevailing myth, held until the 1990s, that the killings had been carried out by fanatical Nazi minorities and by others who killed out of fear of punishment and reprisals if they refused. Browning’s evidence showed that involvement in the killings was much greater than previously thought and that many crimes were committed voluntarily and not under coercion or threats.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, historians found irrefutable evidence that on the Eastern Front and in occupied countries such as Ukraine, the Wehrmacht had actively and extensively collaborated in the massacres of Jewish civilians. The exhibition “War of Annihilation. The Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944,” organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Sciences, toured Germany in the mid-1990s. This exhibition, which graphically documented the army’s involvement in the massacres of civilians, was deeply unsettling to the German public, as until that time official historiography had maintained that the Wehrmacht was a professional force that had fought in accordance with the laws of war and that the massacres had been carried out by the SS and other similar units.
Contributions such as those by Browning and the Hamburg Institute of Social Sciences made it possible to historically contextualize the Holocaust as a mass undertaking, carried out on an industrial scale and utilizing the most advanced technology of the time.
Technological advancement is one of the driving forces of our society. We tend to view it as a positive force that has brought us human, social, and economic progress. But new technologies always carry the potential for harm. The internet allows us to access Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, or the Louvre, but at the same time, it serves as a platform for spreading pornography, hate, and racism. Cell phones allow us to stay in touch with our families or to instantly film and share instances of police abuse, but they are also used for industrial espionage or as bomb detonators. And what dangers can we expect from genetic engineering, cloning, or nanotechnology?
This “dark side of technology” is significant because once new knowledge is created, its spread is unstoppable, especially in our hyperconnected age. Inventions, once created, cannot be “uninvented,” and controlling their dissemination or harmful use is extremely costly. International efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear technology for military use are a dramatic example of the difficulties involved in preventing dangerous knowledge from spreading. This realization shattered the dreams of many scientists, from Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare, to Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
The Holocaust was a prime example of the lethal effects of the “dark side of technology.” It was an industrial-scale project that could not have been carried out without the widespread use of the most modern technology. The persecutions and massacres took place over several years, spanning dozens of countries, languages, and cultures. Millions of victims were transported thousands of kilometers from their homes to concentration and extermination camps. The Holocaust took place across an entire continent, with millions of victims who had to be identified, arrested, transported, stripped of their possessions, murdered, and their remains disposed of. Hundreds of thousands of perpetrators had to be trained, organized, and supervised to carry out immoral, illegal (under international law already in force at that time), and extremely cruel acts for years without interruption. The scale is unimaginable. At Treblinka, the Nazis murdered nearly a million people in 18 months, with just over 100 staff members.
This massive operation was only possible thanks to the extensive use of the best technology available at the time. The visual imagery of the Holocaust is most closely associated with the First and Second Industrial Revolutions: trains, ovens, smokestacks, and chemicals. The Nazi regime was even a pioneer in using the information technologies of the Third Industrial Revolution. They used the most modern IBM equipment of the time to compile lists of deportees, a massive undertaking that, given its scale, would have been very difficult to carry out manually. Without this equipment and its operators, it would have been impossible to locate and transport millions of people and keep detailed records of their origins, family members, and possessions. Far fewer people would have died if that information technology had not been available to the perpetrators.
If, as the history of the Holocaust shows us, technology harbors a threatening potential, can we trust the most educated among us to use technology ethically and responsibly? The experience of the Holocaust and other historical tragedies compels us to be pessimistic. During the Nazi regime, professionals, academic scientists, artists, and intellectuals from all disciplines contributed their specialized knowledge to the drafting of complex racist legislation and the stripping of people of their positions and property. Anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists developed racial theories to provide a pseudoscientific basis for legal discrimination. Thousands of engineers and architects actively collaborated with the systems for classifying, transporting, imprisoning, killing, and cremating the victims. Doctors of all specialties used their knowledge to inflict harm; teachers voluntarily discriminated against their Jewish students; and professors at the top universities passively watched as their Jewish colleagues were expelled. Concentration camps were designed by doctors. Half of the participants at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was decided, held PhDs.
How did the perpetrators justify the criminal use of their knowledge? One explanation was “ignorance” of the ultimate purpose for which their knowledge was being used. Engineers from companies such as Topf or IG Farben who worked inside Birkenau testified at the trials held after the war that they did not know what the ovens, the chambers, or the gas were used for. A variation on “innocence through ignorance” was “due obedience,” by which military personnel, police officers, and professionals and officials of all kinds—even those in the highest ranks—justified their criminal conduct by claiming that they were merely following orders and had no choice but to do so.
A sociological explanation for the criminal behavior of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators and accomplices was offered, among others, by the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. According to Bauman, the organized and collective violence of the Holocaust must be understood as a product of modernity and not as a temporary return to primitive barbarism, as many historians have argued. According to Bauman, very few people are willing to kill personally. However, if each individual action is part of a long chain of actions, the mediating effect creates a psychological distance from the violent act, causing many people who would not be willing to harm another directly to become perpetrators—direct or indirect—of criminal acts.
A third explanation, whose most prominent proponent is Albert Speer—an architect who served as Minister of Armaments under the Nazi regime—is that technology is neutral. Speer argued that professionals are dedicated to creating or using technology to achieve certain predetermined goals and cannot be held responsible if others use those technologies in harmful ways. But the neutrality of technology is an unacceptable moral excuse. History shows that technologies can and have regularly been used for harmful purposes even though they were originally conceived to do good. This is something their creators must consider when developing, using, and placing their technologies in the hands of others.
Just as we all recognize the power of education to transform lives, we must also consider the importance of “the education of power.” I am not referring to educating those in power, but rather to the most educated, because in the knowledge society, power lies with the most educated. For this reason, universities must take on the responsibility of ensuring that the technical training they provide is integrated with a set of ethical standards that guide their conduct.
The “dot-com” generation is well-intentioned, yet at the same time seems oblivious to the risks inherent in technology; they are boundless techno-optimists. Google’s slogan, for example, is “Don’t be evil.” Facebook’s IPO filing states: “Facebook was not created to be a company. It was created to fulfill a social mission of making the world more open and connected.” The “dotcom” generation does not harbor the doubts that Oppenheimer or Haber had about the harmful potential of their creations. It is easier to imagine the harmful potential of poison gas than that of GPS or the atomic bomb than that of genetic manipulation. But privacy violations, increasingly remote and automated destruction, and genetic profiling are just some of the disturbing realities of the global rollout of new technologies.
How is the ethics of technological advancement taught? It is difficult to answer this question, but the first thing we must acknowledge is that there is an ethics of what is not taught. What is not taught says a great deal about the values of an institution or a society. It would be totalitarian to have a single answer on how to teach what are ultimately moral values, because there are different types of cultures, societies, and disciplines. But we must help our students develop a moral sensibility regarding by whom and for what purposes their knowledge and technological creations are used. For example, I have spoken more than once with engineers from very large European companies that supply nuclear equipment which directly or indirectly ends up in countries like North Korea or Iran, and their attitude resembles that of Albert Speer: “I do technical work; it is not my responsibility who uses the technology I create, sell, or maintain.”
I conclude by emphasizing that the Holocaust is a historical legacy for the education of humanity because it provides a framework for students and citizens to examine their own values and ask themselves how they would act in times of crisis. The future of our coexistence in an increasingly technologically advanced era depends on our understanding that human history is, in reality, shaped by people’s values and, in particular, by their willingness to act in accordance with those values.
Thank you very much.
Bibliography
- Bauman, Z. (December 1988). Sociology after the Holocaust. The British Journal of Sociology, 39(4), pp. 469–497.
- Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
- Browning, Ch.R. (1998). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial.
- Speer, A. (1970). Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon & Schuster.