This book is the outcome of many years of conversation among the editors, contributors, and various audiences and readers. Most of the chapters first took shape in a series of panel presentations delivered at the Latin American Studies Association conferences in Toronto (2010), San Francisco (2012), and Washington, D.C. (2013). The volume's authors have also shared their research with colleagues in venues across Argentina as well as with students, activists, and wider publics there and elsewhere. Along the way, we encountered a spectrum of reactions to our project: from enthusiasm and encouragement, to thoughtful critiques, to skepticism and even hostility. Indeed, the range and intensity of these responses not only helped us sharpen our arguments and reframe our assumptions, but they also strengthened our conviction that questions of race and nation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Argentina merit rethinking.

If the subjects treated in this volume touch a nerve for some readers, it is surely because the chapters reconsider the conventional wisdom about Argentine politics, culture, and society held by many commentators in Argentina and abroad. Raising questions about the racial dimensions of inequality, identity, and power in Argentina is itself controversial. And even among those who agree that those are crucial questions, disagreements persist over how best to pose and answer them. To pick one telling example, the very title of this book, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, may provoke some unease. In the United States, references to race as a social dilemma or as an academic area of inquiry are commonplace. Yet in contemporary Argentina, the term raza carries a strongly negative connotation and is thus far less frequently invoked: indeed, it is common for raza to be placed within quotation marks even in the writings of researchers who use the concept to expose problems of discrimination. This circumspect treatment of raza is intended to emphasize its socially constructed, rather than essential or biological, character (despite the fact that other social constructs like género [gender] and clase do not require this kind of treatment), or to signal the concept's status as archaic and somehow foreign to Argentina. The pages that follow devote considerable attention to unraveling the many languages of race in Argentina employed since the early twentieth century and assessing their political implications.

Argentina's economic crisis of 2001 triggered a crisis in national identity that cast doubt on the nation's long-held beliefs about its racial and cultural exceptionalism as a white and therefore modern nation. In the decade after the crisis, Argentina experienced a major shift in racial discourse, redefining itself as a multiracial and multicultural nation. The newly adopted multiculturalism does not entirely displace older understandings of race and nation – as Gastón Gordillo demonstrates in Chapter 9 of this volume, the increased visibility of nonwhites has heightened racial violence in contemporary Argentina – but it does mark a radical departure from previous official discourses that insisted on the nation's homogeneous whiteness. Argentina's rather abrupt multicultural turn has to do in part with the expediency of multiculturalism, which helps articulate both populist and elite reconfigurations of the national narrative. In one sense, the multicultural discourse that focuses largely on Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples disavows previous claims of Europeanness to adopt a populist Latin-Americanist position as an antidote to the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. It is within this context that a contestatory working-class coalition using the racial marker “negro” also arose. Simultaneously, however, multiculturalism is often seen as a sign of neoliberal globalization – as the transnational flow of capital triggers migrations and diversifies cultural consumption – and as a marker of first world status in a global climate in which the notion of development encompasses the “preservation – or even cultivation – of ethnoracial diversity.” In this context, a vast network of institutional, academic, political, and cultural discourses along with popular ethnic activism dismantled notions of white homogeneity to establish Argentina as multicultural. Afro-Argentine and indigenous peoples – who had been considered “disappeared” – claimed their legitimate space within the nation; Argentines of European descent who had melted into the crisol de razas [melting pot] began to assert their ethnicities; and diversity became a key measure of social justice.

This proliferation of ethnicities has more recently extended to Asians in Argentina, as evidenced by their changing position in cultural discourses. In the context of Argentina's incipient multiculturalism, cultural manifestations featuring Asians as protagonists, rather than as exotic or awkward peripheral characters, have gained popularity.

With the start of the new millennium, Argentine readers appear to have developed a taste for a new kind of racial storytelling. Faithful black servants pining for their white mistresses, white captive women falling for their indigenous captors, and enslaved “Hottentot” princes seducing white socialites are some of the unlikely characters populating a new crop of historical fiction, set mostly in Argentina's turbulent nineteenth century. The corpus of stories spotlighting the lives, loves, and tribulations of nonwhite Argentines is expanding rapidly, primarily through novels aimed at adult audiences but also in short story collections and youth literature. Some of these works have won critical acclaim and prizes, and others – largely ignored by the literary establishment – have become mass-market bestsellers.

The popularity of these works in present-day Argentina is striking given the efforts of past generations of Argentine politicians, thinkers, and writers to set their nation apart, racially and culturally, from its neighbors. This project itself rested substantially upon a particular kind of racial storytelling – historical, political, or literary narratives that, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, idealized or asserted Argentina's homogeneous whiteness and Europeanness as part of a “civilizing” process. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, proponents of this “white legend” of Argentine racial history declared indigenous people and Afro-Argentines to have disappeared through war, disease, or peaceful assimilation. Throughout the twentieth century, celebrations of Argentina as a “perfectly white” country of immigrants “descended from the boats,” a “melting pot” of primarily European ethnicities, came to enjoy widespread acceptance among Argentina's urban educated sectors. The notion of Argentine whiteness and exceptionalism has also been indirectly reinforced by what we might call a “black legend” of Argentine racial history. This critical counter-narrative, embraced at different times by historians, politicians, ethnic activists, and other public figures, provides a dark (rather than rosy) vision of Argentine whiteness: it sympathizes with the indigenous and Afro-Argentine victims of nineteenth-century “civilizing” campaigns and denounces the violence and discrimination that led to their “extermination” or “genocide.”

Yet this newer crop of tales offers a different kind of racial storytelling, paralleling the recent rise in Argentine public life of what I call “brown legends” of Argentine racial identity.

In many countries, the persecution of Jews did not stop at legal measures. However, the intensity of anti-Jewish violence differed widely. Three countries conducted mass murders of Jews. In several waves (the worst of which was in 1942), about three-quarters of the 40,000 Jews in the state of Croatia were either massacred by their compatriots or, to a lesser extent, deported to German-run death camps. Most of the rest survived underground; a few thousand belonged to government-protected groups. In 1941–42, largely, Romanians killed or let die at least 250,000 Jews, primarily those deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria and local Soviet Jews from occupied Transnistria, but the Romanian government refused to surrender as many Jews from the Old Kingdom to Germany, and they survived the war. For some time, the Hungarian government refused to allow Jews to be deported to Germany until the German invasion in March 1944, when the Sztójay government cooperated closely in the deportation of more than 400,000 Jews to Germany, and the Arrow Cross regime handed over another 76,000. About 250,000 Jews from Greater Hungary survived, half inside the country in the Budapest ghettos and the forced labor service, and the other half in German camps. Hungarian authorities deported at least 16,000 Jews without Hungarian citizenship to the former Soviet territories of Galicia and Volyn in the summer of 1941, whereupon German and Hungarian forces soon shot them; more than 20,000 Jews may have died in the army's Labor Battalions between 1942 and 1943, and Arrow Cross squads killed many thousands in Budapest in late 1944.

Other governments which did not themselves organize the mass destruction of Jews did, however, acquiesce to it; some (like Slovakia) even offered to deport their Jews to Germany, or (as was the case in Hungary and Bulgaria) sometimes urged Germany to deport Jews more quickly. Non-German police or gendarmerie often made arrests. In this way, 80% of the Slovakian Jews were deported in 1942, and most of them killed, while the rest were kept in Slovakia as forced laborers – although many of these were killed in the wake of the Slovakian national uprising in August and September 1944. The fascist Norwegian government had about half of the country's approximately 2,000 Jewish inhabitants (all they could lay hands on) deported in 1942; the rest escaped to Sweden.

The impact of settlement policies

Settling Germans throughout large parts of eastern Europe was an important long-term aim for some Nazi racial ideologists, including Hitler. This conflicted with the exploitative or economic imperialism also pursued by some of the same ideologists (see Chapter 7). Some historians have argued that the settlement policy determined the German policies of violence in eastern Europe; they view the displacement of populations and large-scale mass murder against Jews and Slavs as fairly straightforward implementations of an ideological blueprint of Germanization. Given the ideological contradiction just mentioned, German settlement schemes and their effects require evaluation.

This matter is often discussed under the headline ‘Generalplan Ost.’ Scholars understand the Generalplan Ost as a number of interconnected plans drawn up by a variety of SS authorities, namely the Planning Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKF) – the planning authority in charge – and the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA). Other authorities such as the German Labor Front and some civil administrations also produced less detailed or less comprehensive plans. A first RKF draft from June 1941 referred to occupied Poland. A later version produced by the RSHA in late 1941 provided for the eastward displacement of 31 million– plus all of the Jews – of the 45 million inhabitants of Poland, the Baltic area, Belarus and northwestern Ukraine to be replaced over thirty years by 4.5 million Germans who would later proliferate. According to an RKF scheme from May 1942, 5.5 million Germanic settlers (including about 700,000 Germanized locals, especially from the Baltic countries) were to settle within twenty to twenty-five years in western Poland, large parts of central Poland, two strings of a total of twenty-two small settlement areas in the Baltic and Ukraine, and larger settlement regions in and north of the Crimea as well as around Leningrad. An enhanced RKF “general settlement plan” of December 1942 covered Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, Alsace, Lorraine, Luxembourg, parts of Slovenia and settlements in the Baltic countries. The non-German population was to be reduced by about 25 million to 11 million people within 30 years and replaced, excluding the Baltic area, by 12 million Germanic settlers. All of these plans anticipated the assimilation of various percentages of non-Germans in the settlement areas.

Many scholars have argued that the murder of Jews in Europe defied all economic logic, violated Nazi economic interests and contradicted their war effort. Blanket statements about, for example, the “fundamentally anti-economic character of the [Nazi] genocide” are popular but untenable. Others have offered arbitrary and contradictory interpretations about what had primacy – the war economy or racist ideology. This shows how problematic it is to ask simplistic either/or questions in this context. It is more fruitful not to take economics and ideology as opposites. There were complex interrelationships between the two.

This chapter deals with the labor factor in relation to Jewish and other forced labor. But it is important to understand that economic considerations related to the killing of Jews were not about labor alone. Further chapters will treat the connections between food, housing, settlement, finance and transportation policies and the persecution and extermination of Jews. They will show that some economic factors tended to spur the murder of Jews in crucial ways, while others, such as labor and transportation, were obstacles to it. Contradictions between economic interests and the destruction of Jews were more limited than is often assumed. And severe contradictions emerged between different German economic interests (e.g., labor versus food, labor versus housing and transportation versus housing). The fundamental situation underlying all these issues was scarcity. Modern economies in major wars are economies not of surplus but of want, shortages and restraints. Moreover, the debate has so far centered on the logic of national economies, but some things that did not make sense for a national economy were in harmony with individual gain.

This chapter starts with a sketch of the German labor supply, the forced labor program and the situation of forced laborers as the context for the development and conditions of, and the restrictions on, the forced labor of Jews. It deals with the geographic distribution of labor and the evolution of forced labor in general, and Jewish labor in particular, because these were closely related.

In the Reich: The forced labor program

In early November 1941 Hitler stated: “The area that works for us now includes more than 250 million people, but the area indirectly at our disposal has more than 350 million human beings.”

In the nineteenth century, the region that would become Germany underwent profound economic, social, political and cultural transformation. Especially from the middle of the century, industrialization set in forcefully. By 1900, Germany was one of the two greatest industrial nations – together with the USA – leading in steel, chemical, and, later, electrical industries. Around 1900, about half of all Germans lived in urban areas to which many impoverished rural dwellers had moved and where a broad middle class was emerging which, by 1900, included, increasingly, many white-collar workers. From the 1840s to the late nineteenth century, streams of Germany's rural poor emigrated, particularly to the Americas. Inside Germany, a network of large cities developed linked by a railroad system that was largely complete by 1880. Imbalances remained – the northeast, still dominated by large rural estates, contained few industrial, urban centers. Germany became a leading nation also in science, technology, and, by the early twentieth century, the arts.

By 1806, the remnants of the outdated first German empire had collapsed under the Napoleonic onslaught. Under the leadership of Prussia, the largest German state, a new German nation state was founded in 1871 – a constitutional monarchy that united smaller kingdoms and duchies, but which excluded Austria. New ministries and strong bureaucratic institutions were swiftly established. In the late nineteenth century, government interference in the economy and social life increased with the first rudimentary elements of social insurance. This insufficiently addressed the so-called ‘social question’ of the millions of urban workers living in miserable conditions who increasingly formed their own political and social organizations which threatened bourgeois-aristocratic rule. Tendencies toward a welfare state became stronger – although without ending widespread poverty – after Germany became a republic with the introduction of universal suffrage in late 1918. The monarchy was toppled by infuriated workers and soldiers who were weary of a war effort primarily placed on their shoulders that seemed to them to make less and less sense, especially given that Germany was heading toward defeat. Red flags flew over Berlin, but then the strong working-class movement split, and the radical left was defeated. The period of the Weimar Republic was characterized by economic and political instability and fierce internal conflicts between the political left and right in which the initially strong centrist parties melted away.

This book puts the murder of European Jews in much broader contexts than is usual. It describes Germans’ mindsets and interests that influenced the destruction. It considers episodes of mass violence against non-Jewish groups and relates and compares them to the fate of Jews. And it takes the policies of non-German states and the behavior of other societies into account. The book's point of departure is that we should analyze modern mass violence as a multi-causal, participatory process that victimizes multiple groups. This approach is meant to uncover dynamics that are not visible when one examines the fate of one persecuted group alone, or when one only examines the history of the state and of political ideas.

As a result, this study emphasizes, more than others, the impact of popular racism (rather than scientific notions of race), nationalism and economic interests on the persecution of Jews and other groups, particularly interests in gains for the non-Jewish bourgeoisie and the educated middle class. My findings suggest that in many regards the background to persecution by Nazi Germany and other countries did not differ as much as is often portrayed. In each country (other than Germany), individual, group and what were perceived as national interests mattered more than Germany's. These national interests did not go uncontested and were sometimes the subject of public debate, as was the violence. Among Germans, these interests were much less contested since there was less social conflict within Germany than there was elsewhere. Facing persecution from forces beyond merely the state, Jews’ survival strategies were adapted to deal with the situation of being under threat also from large parts of the population.

Logics of persecution: Economy, ideology and multi-causality

The persecution of European Jews was unusual in many ways; for example, it was a transnational and international action. Yet, like other political processes, it is explainable, since it was structured by a variety of actors with identifiable attitudes and interests. The latter were more changeable than the former, although interests too could have a long-term character and impact. Explanations of the extermination of European Jews will probably always remain controversial. This book has offered elements of an explanation by exploring different logics of the persecution of Jews: racist thought, imperialistic chauvinism, counterinsurgency strategies, various economic-material factors and foreign policy goals. Although I have discussed these threads one by one, they were in reality interwoven.

On November 25, 1941, the largest political show of force of Hitler's international coalition took place in Berlin. High representatives of thirteen member states of the Anti-Comintern Pact – Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Manchukuo, Spain, Bulgaria, Nanking China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania and Slovakia – met to demonstrate their participation in the fight against the Communist International and also their mutual political support in general. The last seven signed the revised treaty on that day. The German press called the meeting a “world sensation.” But what a strange coalition it was! Despite their official condemnation of communism, these states varied considerably in their political systems and economies as well as their involvement in World War II. Denmark, an occupied and neutral country according to the Danish Foreign Minister, Erik Scavenius, had outlawed the Communist Party but would not declare war on any state (including the USSR) because the population would not support that. Franco's regime in Spain, which had come to power in what it portrayed as a largely anti-communist civil war, argued that it had to remain neutral in World War II because of the devastation it had already suffered. Finland's Foreign Minister, Rolf Witting, was happy that his country fought against the USSR but did not commit itself to declaring war on Great Britain. By contrast, Bulgaria did so in December 1941 while at the same time refusing to declare war on the Soviet Union, despite its fiercely anti-communist government, because of its historic cultural ties with Russia. Hungary and Romania, which both had troops on the Eastern Front, also had troops amassed along their common border and within weeks would come close to armed hostilities against each other; and Romania's Antonescu conspired against Hungary during the meeting in Berlin. And the Japanese representative, Ambassador General Nagisa Oshima, did not even reveal (either openly or in secret talks) that his country would attack the USA within two weeks, let alone the fact that Japan would not invade the Soviet Union. Of the thirteen member states of the Anti-Comintern Pact in late 1941, only seven entered the war with the USSR.

Nazi ideology is often given a major or overriding importance in explaining the murder of the European Jews. Many scholars see racism and anti-Jewish attitudes at the core of this ideology. Some historians argue that anti-Jewish ideas were necessary or a precondition for extermination but not sufficient to explain it. Some have portrayed hatred of Jews as being at the center of Nazi ideology, in contrast to those who put anti-Judaism in a broader context of racism and social utopias. In fact, “anti-Semitism,” though important, does not explain “eugenics, pro-natalism, killing the disabled, militarism, expansionism, or Nazi racial policies aimed at Gypsies, blacks, Slavs, or the ‘asocial.’ ” This chapter takes a closer look at the sometimes surprising inner workings of Nazi and German racist thought in order to locate anti-Jewish sentiments therein and explain differences between racial theory and political practice.

Racism as a form of ascribing a common ancestry to groups, assuming qualitative differences, and justifying social hierarchies among them on that basis, has been known in many cultures and for thousands of years. European ‘scientific’ racism evolved in the seventeenth century – first as a legitimation of European superiority over non-European peoples, supplemented in the nineteenth century by the idea that large human collectives within Europe differed biologically. In the second half of the 1800s, some degree of racist thought became common among European thinkers. This way of thinking influenced the spread of nationalism in Europe (and beyond), generating something that has been called “ethnopolitics,” and certain aspects of such racism have been portrayed as “rebellion against modernity.” Racial thinking seemed to provide orientation during a time of social upheaval that was being brought about by industrial capitalism and moral crisis.

According to Nazi-German racists, race membership determined everyday and political life. They explained history as a sequence of struggles among races, for example, over land for sustenance. Increasingly, races were assumed to be of different values, as were the people who belonged to them. Racists ascribed certain mentalities, character traits, patterns of behavior and cultural achievements to each race, usually putting their own race first. In Germany, people of the ‘Nordic’ race were supposed to be of the highest quality. One German didactical book hierarchically ordered the races as follows: white people over people of color; among whites, Aryans over Jews; and among Aryans, the “Nordic” races over the eastern ones.

This book offers a particular perspective on the destruction of the European Jews. It places the persecution of Jews in the context of interdependent policies regarding warfare, occupation and policing, social issues, economics, racist thought and popular racism. The study also describes the murder of Jews amidst massive violence against other groups and attempts to make connections among these different sorts of violence. This differs from narratives that examine the persecution and murder of Jews alone with little regard to the fate of other groups, on the basis of a history of ideas with relatively few other forms of contextualization. In addition, this book gives more prominence than many other works to the persecution of Jews by non-Germans and tries to provide a general analysis of this persecution across national boundaries.

This book's perspective is derived from a new approach to understanding mass violence that I have recently suggested. In brief, I find the prevailing explanations too state centered, too focused on the intents and plans of rulers and too concentrated on race and ethnicity as causes, and they are usually concerned with the persecution of one group that is treated in isolation from other victim groups. Historically, by contrast, various population groups in many countries were victims of massive physical violence in which diverse social groups, acting together with state organs, participated for a multitude of reasons. These three aspects – the participatory character of violence, multiple victim groups and multi-causality – were interconnected. Simply put, the occurrence and thrust of mass violence depends on broad and diverse support, but this support is based on a variety of motives and interests that cause violence to spread in different directions and in varying intensities and forms. In emphasizing that mass violence is based on complex participatory processes, I speak of extremely violent societies. These phenomena can be traced through many important historical cases of mass violence such as the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the 1950s, the late Ottoman Empire (including the destruction of the Armenians), Cambodia, Rwanda and North America in the nineteenth century.

The same traits – broad participation, multiple motives and several victim groups – can also be found in the violence of Germans and people from other nations during World War II.

This chapter deals with the interrelated issues of the organizational structures of German mass violence against Jews and others, and of the people who participated in these processes. It contradicts the popular image that Nazism worked on the basis of strict hierarchies, orders and obedience, and that the extermination of Jews was organized smoothly in a factory-like fashion. In reality, the Nazi system was semi-decentralized and permitted a good deal of flexibility, informal coordination and autonomy, but it also generated some friction because it gave individuals and groups room to pursue their own interests.

A semi-decentralized process

Table 6.1 is telling in several ways. It shows that of the five major German extermination camps three different agencies were in charge and three different technologies used. Four of these camps, or rather killing stations, had a regional function and were run by regional agencies. They were primarily used to kill Jews from the areas where they were located. Virtually everyone who arrived there was murdered, unlike at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where staff sorted out considerable numbers of deportees for forced labor. (Regarding the other killing centers, ‘selections’ took place at the location of departure before deportation.) The experimental character of the methods of destruction in the beginning is well known. But although the planning of these five killing stations stretched over a year, new technologies or operational procedures for murder introduced at one site did not lead to a change at the others. All of this shows that the killing process was not fully centralized.

Table 6.1 also indicates that about every second murdered Jew was gassed, if one includes the victims of gas vans at other places than Chełmno and murders in other concentration camps than Auschwitz. About 2 million Jews were shot, primarily in the occupied Soviet territories. The existence of gas chambers and gas vans did not stop the mass shootings, which continued through 1942 and into 1943, claiming far more than half a million victims in 1942 alone. Thus, four major technologies for murder existed in 1942. Much has been made of the smoothly working so-called ‘industrial’ German mass murder that was taking place in extermination camps, but this picture is somewhat misleading given that half of the murdered Jews did not perish in gas chambers, that three of the five major annihilation centers listed above had no crematorium,[…]