Auschwitz is a lasting symbol of apocalyptic hatred of Jews

Catherine, Princess of Wales and Prince William, Prince of Wales light candles during a ceremony commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in London. Picture:Getty Images

Entering Auschwitz on Saturday, January 27, 1945, the Soviet soldiers struggled to make sense of what they saw. The camp’s liberation had not come cheaply: overcoming fierce resistance from German guards cost some 230 Soviet lives. As they fought to break through, the Soviet troops knew virtually nothing about what lay behind the dense thickets of barbed wire.

According to General Vassily Petrenko, one of the operation’s commanders, “We only learned about the camp’s existence the previous night”. And they were given next to no information about the camp itself.

That this was a site of mass murder was soon obvious. But in fleeing, the SS had tried to remove every trace of the slaughter of 1.1 million people, of whom one million were Jews.

Of the 67,000 inmates who were in Auschwitz 10 days before it was freed, only 7000 remained, the rest having been sent on “death marches” that quickly earned their grim name. Strewn amid frozen corpses, the survivors, whose bodies had to be carefully examined to ascertain whether they were dead or alive, hardly had the strength to explain the camp’s workings.

It took two months for a coherent picture to emerge. Once it did, however, its horror made “Auschwitz” synonymous with the Holocaust and defined the image that gave, and still gives, the newly coined term “genocide” its emotive force.

Yet the transformation of Auschwitz into a symbolic reference had fateful consequences. As the whole notion of genocide was stretched into meaninglessness, the specific nature of the Holocaust, and of factors that made it possible, faded from sight. And with them faded public understanding of the risk that it could recur.

To say that is not to ignore the many controversies that mark the enormous scholarly literature. But this much is beyond dispute: had it not been for the apocalyptic version of anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology, the Holocaust would never have occurred.

The Jews were, Hitler said, “the evil enemy of mankind”, “vermin” who, like “rats”, poison the body politic. The choice was stark: either “our people and our country become these bloodthirsty Jewish tyrants’ victims”, allowing “the entire world to fall into their clutches”; or “if Germany can free itself from the Jews’ grasp, this greatest of all dangers will be eliminated from the whole world”.

And on January 30, 1939, as he prepared to launch the “final struggle” to assure the supremacy of the Aryan race, Hitler, speaking “as a prophet”, assured the German people that the battle would end “not in the victory of Judaism, but in the extermination of Europe’s Jews”.

It was that apocalyptic vision, which combined an unbridgeable division between the good and the evil with the conviction that salvation requires the disappearance of the evil from the face of the Earth, that gave the “final solution” its impetus. Elevating slaughter into a moral duty, it justified acquiescence at best, active participation at worst, in crimes that, merely a decade earlier, would have seemed unimaginable.

Unfortunately, apocalyptic anti-Semitism did not vanish with the Nazi Reich’s collapse. On the contrary, it lived on in the Middle East, where it could build on beliefs deeply ingrained in the Muslim world. Fusing elements of Jewish messianism and Christian millenarianism, Islam had long nourished an apocalyptic narrative in which small and then great “signs of the hour” unleash a sequence of terrifying events that culminate in “a grievous day for the disbelievers”. As the Mahdi, a messianic deliverer, leads the “army of wrath” to victory, the oppressors of the faithful will drown in rivers of blood, heralding the end of times.

That vision always coexisted uneasily with official Islam, which was wary of apocalyptic fantasies’ potential to foment unrest. But grounded in both the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings and teachings of Muhammad), the promise of deliverance steadily acquired doctrinal prominence.

Epitomised by the rebellion that swept Sudan in the 1880s – when a self-proclaimed Mahdi announced his intention “to destroy this world in order to construct the other world” – one of the vision’s most distinctive features was its obsessive focus on Jews.

Thus, in his highly respected compilation of Hadith, Muhammad al-Bukhari (809-870) warned that “the Last Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them”. Slightly later, as Sufism was taking shape, the integral role of the extermination of the Jews in unlocking the “Last Hour” was emphasised by ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240), the most celebrated of Islam’s great mystics.

It then received authoritative endorsement from the 13th and 14th centuries’ teachings of the scholar Abu ’Abd al-Andalusi, known as al-Qurtubi, and especially of ibn Kathir, who was a disciple of ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), the unrivalled champion of Hanbali literalism.

Establishing an intellectual tradition on which future generations could draw, it was those works, rather than European anti-Semitism, that provided the doctrinal foundations for the explosive growth of apocalyptic versions of Islam that began with the Iranian revolution in 1979.

The subsequent outpouring of apocalyptic texts – in which Jews are repeatedly described as “harmful vermin that eats its own dung”, “termites that gouge the wood until it collapses” and “scorpions that harm only the non-Jews who come close to them” – contain plenty of claims that verge on delirium.

For example, according to the wildly popular Egyptian author Said Ayyub, who has spawned imitators throughout the Muslim world, “the Jews have placed themselves in the hands of the Antichrist”, planning “the Third World War in order to eliminate Islam”. Fortunately, in the colossal battles that will unfold as the final hour strikes, “their corpses will be delivered up to the birds of Armageddon, and their flesh will be scattered about the skies”.

But drenched in the stock figure of the scheming Jew and celebrating in advance the Jewish people’s complete disappearance, the vision those works embody is now at the very heart of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s world view – as well as that of near-nuclear Iran. Rendering hatred inexpiable and compromise inconceivable, there is only one thing that will quench their fanaticism – a new Holocaust.

Years ago, as the Nazis armed for war, Sebastian Haffner, who fled Germany for England, despaired over the inability of the British to understand that there could be people who would never accept a compromise or respect an agreement. Convinced there were “moderates” in the Nazi party whose position would be strengthened by concessions, the appeasers and sentimentalists were, Haffner said, “dooming humanity to disaster”.

That is the tragedy of this week’s commemorations. As Israel is once again threatened by genocidal enemies, and violent anti-Semitism becomes normalised, world leaders stood by, piously intoning “never again”. In refusing to learn history’s lessons, they sullied the memory of the millions whose lives were stolen on Auschwitz’s sombre plains.