[opiniojuris] Kevin Jon Heller: Michael Medved, Slave Labor, and the Holocaust

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Posted by Kevin Jon Heller:
Michael Medved, Slave Labor, and the Holocaust
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1191041845.shtml


   A number of progressive bloggers are having fun with Michael Medved's
   new column, [1]"Six Inconvenient Truths about the U.S. and Slavery."
   Much of the criticism of the right-wing radio host's column has
   focused on the following passage, in which Medved seems to argue that
   the real victims of the slave trade were the slave traders themselves,
   who lost much of their valuable cargo during the difficult passage
   from Africa to the U.S.:

     Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions
     of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors
     of the âMiddle Passageâ across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain
     inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave
     âcargoâ who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport
     from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages
     involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of
     deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling)
     live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

   That's a remarkably dumb comment, regardless what Medved actually
   intended to convey. But it pales in comparison to his attempt to
   distinguish the slave trade from the Holocaust:

     By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate
     slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably
     preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than
     murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons
     between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis
     occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but
     the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass
     death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave
     dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property
     cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would
     cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave
     owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as
     possible. 

   There is no question that the Nazis' "ultimate purpose" was to rid the
   world of Jews. But they did not "occasionally benefit" from slave
   labor. On the contrary, as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals pointed
   out again and again in the Industrialist cases, the massive industrial
   expansion of Germany industry that made the Nazis wars of aggression
   possible required the systematic use of slave labor. Indeed, the
   numbers are staggering: according to the testimony of Fritz Sauckel,
   the Plenitpotentiary General for Labor Allocation, at the height of
   the war at least 5,000,000 non-Germans were being forced to work in
   German industrial plants. (Many [2]solid estimates put the number much
   higher, between 9,500,000 and 10,000,000.) Some of those workers might
   have worked in conditions not quite awful enough to qualify as "slave
   labor," but the overwhelming majority of them did. Here, for example,
   is Matthew Lippman's description of Krupp's treatment of 520 of the
   100,000 slave laborers it employed during WW II:

     Some insight into the situation of concentration camp workers is
     provided by the Krupp firm's treatment of 520 Jewish females
     between fifteen and twenty-five years of age who had been
     transferred from Buchenwald to the industrial center at Essen. The
     women were clad in sack-like burlap garments and wooden clogs with
     fabric tops. Some lacked shoes, resulting in frozen feet and
     chilblains. Their heads were closely-shaved in the shape of a
     cross. The inmates were forced to live in a dank and dark cellar
     with no sanitary facilities following the bombing of the
     Humboldtstrasse labor camp in 1944. A single blanket was issued for
     bedding as well as for protection against the cold and rain during
     the lengthy marches to the plant. The women subsisted on a single
     meal of soup and bread, supplemented with margarine or marmalade.
     The inmate workers were roused at four, assembled for roll-call
     thirty minutes later, and began the workday at six. They were
     required to carry bricks and iron roofing sheets without gloves or
     other protection. The sluggish and weak were kicked and hit, and
     discipline was enforced by the deprivation of food. The women were
     excluded from the air raid shelter, which was restricted to German
     personnel during bombing raids.
     As the American troops approached in February 1945, the Krupp firm
     learned that the Reich had decided to exterminate the women. Krupp
     nevertheless shipped the women back to Auschwitz and â(w)ith the
     exception of a few who had escaped . . . nothing further has been
     discovered about the fate of the young 'Hungarian Jewesses' of the
     Krupp firm."

   The sad truth is that slave labor was a necessary condition of the
   Holocaust. The Final Solution required the Nazis to wage wars of
   aggression against countries with significant Jewish populations.
   Those aggressive wars required a massive expansion of German
   industrial production. And that industrial expansion required the
   systematic use of slave labor, Jewish and otherwise.
   A more vicious circle is difficult to imagine.

References

   1. http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/MichaelMedved/2007/09/26/six_inconvenient_truths_about_the_us_and_slavery
   2. http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/staff/material/schmidt/labourers.htm