Histories of the Holocaust, and there are many, depict a massacre of humanity that is not only horrifying even in distant retrospect but astonishing in its commentary on human conduct. How could anyone, any people, of any nationality or culture, coldly and efficiently murder such a volume of human beings and do so, to borrow a phrase of the American Declaration of Independence, “without regard to age, sex or condition?” How could a man, and I mean Hitler himself, inspire such a monstrous crime against civilization and humanity?
Well, it seems he may have had a good mentor.
Hitler seems to have studied the history of Genghis Khan and the Mongols in some depth. He mentioned the great Khan only occasionally but when he did it showed a familiarity with the Khan’s history. Hitler’s comments show that he spent some time reading the Mongol history and of course the Khan was no slouch when it came to mass murder. Actually, what we know of the history of the Mongol conquests suggests the Hitler and company were only amateurish imitators. Here are some modern descriptions of the Mongol predations:
In 2011 a team of ecologists from the Carnegie Institute made a startling discovery. They determined that an event between the 13th and 14th centuries caused such widespread death and destruction that millions of acres of cultivated land returned to forest, causing global carbon levels to plummet. This event was bigger than the fall of China’s Ming Dynasty or even the Black Death. The team said this event was not produced by nature and actually the first, and only case of successful man-made global cooling. It was not hard to guess who was responsible: Genghis Khan and his descendants triggered 40 million deaths in this period, making him one of the bloodiest, and ironically, the greenest, dictators in history. Through his battles and systematic slaughter, he removed 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, equivalent to the amount released from one year of gasoline use today. Massive depopulation in the domains of his conquest, which covered 22 percent of the earth, resulted in the return of forests and their scrubbing of carbon from the atmosphere.[1]
Hitler’s study of the Khan and his methods came up periodically in conversations within his inner circle. He held regular dinners with this inner ring during the war, up until the Wehrmacht’s disaster at Stalingrad in 1943. During these repasts Martin Bormann, his faithful secretary, took notes which were later compiled and published in a volume titled, “Hitler’s Table Talk.” Here are Hitler’s words in a few excerpts:
A people can prove to be well fitted for battle even although it is ill-fitted for civilisation. From the point of view of their value as combatants, the armies of Genghiz Khan were not inferior to those of Stalin (provided we take away from Bolshevism what it owes to the material civilisation of the West).[2]
I’m going to become a religious figure. Soon I’ll be the great chief of the Tartars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tartars I shall become Khan. The only thing of which I shall be incapable is to share the sheiks’ mutton with them. I’m a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat. If they don’t wait too long, I’ll fall back on their harems![3]
It is very stupid to sneer at the Stakhanov[4] system. The arms and equipment of the Russian armies are the best proof of its efficiency in the handling of industrial man-power. Stalin, too, must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well, and the scope of his industrial planning is exceeded only by our own Four Year Plan. And there is no doubt that he is quite determined that there shall be in Russia no unemployment such as one finds in such capitalist States as the United States of America.[5]
Europe has once before had a similar lucky escape; at the battle of Liegnitz the Hungarians — how, goodness only knows — stopped the Mongol hordes. Whether it was the losses they suffered in the battle or the death of Genghiz Khan in Mongolia that caused the Mongols to retreat, we shall never know.[6]
Here is a lesson we should do well to learn: if we do not complete the conquest of the East utterly and irrevocably, each successive generation will have war on its hands, in a greater or lesser degree. Even stupid races can accomplish something, given good leadership. Genghiz Khan’s genius for organisation was something quite unique.[7]
“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians [I found this online but without a citation. It is at best apocryphal. But it suggests that Hitler was confident that the worst atrocities would be lost in the passage of time. No one talks about Mongol genocide today. Hardly anyone is aware of it.] ?”
Adding to that, Hitler’s SS (Schutzstaffel) was a further emulation of Mongol methods. It was a re-creation of the Khan’s Keshig. From a detailed history of the Khan and his conquests:
The key to Genghis’s post-1206 system was twofold: the tumen and the Keshig. Tumen literally meant 10,000, akin to the Roman legion; Keshig was Genghis’ praetorian guard.[8]
And:
This was the famous Keshig. The sudden increase had nothing to do with security – if anything, after the successful conclusion of his Mongolian wars the threat to the khan was far less – but it was Genghis’s way of maintaining an iron grip on the system he had created.[9]
In the history of Genghis Khan the Keshig looms large. It started as a bodyguard of 150 men. Over the years and through wide-ranging conquests it reached the size of an army. Its function expanded from guarding the Khan himself to enforcing the Khan’s reign against enemies within and without. It evolved from an instrument of security to an instrument of power.
We know Hitler’s carbon-copy of the Mongol Keshig as the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the infamous SS. It also started as a bodyguard unit for the protection of the Fuehrer and grew into a giant organization of police and enforcers and, finally, an instrument of extermination. The SS became the operator of the Einsatzgruppen and the death camps.
It takes one back to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes:
Ecclesiastes 001:009 That which has been is that which shall be; and that which has been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Hitler expressly admired the ancient Khan and approved at least of his accomplishments and probably of his talents. It could have eased the adoption of absolute pragmatism in dealing with his enemies that he demonstrated during his absolute rule of Germany. The death camps with their gas chambers and crematoria are less shocking to someone who has read the histories of the Mongols’ thoroughgoing exterminations of humans in places like Baghdad,[10] Otrar[11] and Peking. The towering pyramids of severed human heads left in the wake of the Mongol armies prepare one’s conscious comprehension for any outrage against humanity. Even the cold-blooded daily chores of the Einsatzgruppen, machine-gunning unarmed civilians to death by the hundreds of thousands fails to disturb one who has already absorbed the enormity of the calculated and systematic eradication of populations in China and the Middle East. It could only have encouraged Hitler that these atrocities could be committed and that in time their horror would fade from memory.
Perhaps this gives a small insight into the mind of a monster. Monstrosity it seems, like other human aberrations, may become less disturbing with the amelioration of familiarity. It’s scary to contemplate how far the reconciliation with frank horrors might go if one were to really subject himself to such ghastly inurement. But a passing acquaintance with the horrors of the Mongol Conquests may well have tempered Hitler’s intention and acceptance of the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution.
Or might one have a look at the accomplishments of Rumania’s Vlad the Impaler for an euphemistic comparison?
[1] — Rank, Michael. History’s Worst Dictators: A Short Guide to the Most Brutal Rulers, From Emperor Nero to Ivan the Terrible (Function). Kindle Edition.
[2] Hitler’s Table Talk, 12th November 1941.
[3] Hitler’s Table Talk, Night of 12th-13th January 1942.
[4] From Russ Envision New Era, published in The Windsor Daily Star (Windsor, Ontario, Canada) of Tuesday 19th November 1935 [Vol. 35, No. 66, page 20, column 6]: MOSCOW, Nov. 19.—The Russian Government yesterday flatly announced that it had found a short-cut to Utopia.
In an amazing decree delivered before the National Stakhanovite Congress which opened in the Kremlin, Dictator Josef Stalin pledged the Soviet Government to the strangest of all new deals, whereby:
1—One man will be able to do the work of 50.
2—The ruthless Socialistic dictatorship which now rules will be replaced by true Communism, whereby every worker’s day will consist mainly of leisure hours.
3—Great national wealth will be equally shared.
All this is to be accomplished through a movement known as Stakhanovitism. Just what this mouth-filling “ism” means is somewhat beyond Occidental comprehension, but foreign observers here declared that through it Russia has at last found a religion to replace the Orthodox Church which Communism swept away.
[5] Hitler’s Table Talk, 22nd July 1942, at dinner.
[6] Hitler’s Table Talk, 26th August 1942, evening.
[7] Hitler’s Table Talk, 28th August 1942, midday.
[8] McLynn, Frank. “Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy” (p. 99). (Function). Kindle Edition.
[9] McLynn, Frank. Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy (p. 103). (Function). Kindle Edition.
[10] Baghdad joined the long roster of famous cities destroyed by the Mongols: Peking, Kaifeng, Samarkand, Bukhara, Kiev, Moscow, Cracow, Budapest. McLynn, Frank. Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy (p. ). (Function). Kindle Edition.
[11] A city in the Kwarazmian Empire invested by the Mongols in 1219. Ogodei and Chagatai ordered the city razed to the ground; it was never rebuilt, and its ghostly ruins attested to the folly of opposing the greatest power on earth.
McLynn, Frank. Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy (pp. 271-272). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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