Michael Medved, Slave Labor, and the Holocaust

A number of progressive bloggers are having fun with Michael Medved’s new column, “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 “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” 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 of what Medved might have 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 least 5,000,000 non-Germans were being forced to work in German industrial plants at the height of the war. (Many 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 “[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 Medved is wrong: slave labor was an integral part of the Holocaust — even its necessary condition. 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.