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Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

be no end to the intrusive nature of technology; every facet of our lives seems to
come under the insidious sway of the technical. It is as though we have relinquished
our capacity to look on the world in any way other than through this technological
lens. The way we are currently thrown such that we reveal the real in the ways we do
seems insurmountable. Perhaps what Heidegger is suggesting then is that the mindset
of those involved at various levels in the implementation of the Final Solution, for
example, was partly determined by a technological revealing which they themselves
exercised no control over. This challenging revealing was something that, at least in
part, contributed to the way whole peoples were rendered as mere logistical problems
to be solved. In the same way that cities were revealed as military targets to be eliminated, despite the horrific collateral damage that entailed, hundreds of thousands of
people at a time were reduced to simply a surfeit of physical waste to be disposed of
as efficiently as possible; and not just Jews, rather every group that found themselves
on the wrong side of the Nazi world-view.12 Granted the revealing that Heidegger
characterizes as the essence of technology did not make anyone antisemitic; to
that extent Daniel Goldhagens13 objections to the functionalists arguments cannot
be completely ignored. However, it must also be recognized that people were (and
remain) eminently amenable to the idea of reducing people to mere stock, resource
and waste; the process whereby people are dehumanized and indeed treated as
commodities is long standing and this prevailing tendency certainly did play a part
in the Final Solution.

The Holocaust and the revealing rhetoric of the

Final Solution
Can we think of Heideggers analyses then as shedding light on how/why the
xenophobic aspirations of the Third Reich were realized in the way that they were?
What do we make of the fact that significant numbers of Russian POWs were
murdered using the same industrial means as those used to exterminate millions of
Jewish people as part of the Final Solution? Yet the extermination of Russian POWs
was part of a different set of objectives to those associated with the fervent antisemitism which yoked itself onto the other military and political objectives of the Third
Reich. Should we not say, in that case, that it was not so much that antisemitism led
to the methods of extermination, rather the way the world (and many people within
it) was revealed technologically prompted antisemitic aspirations to be realized
through such methods, just as that same ordinance of revealing allowed the German
military to envision the industrial slaughter and disposal of Russian POWs.14 Our
brief analysis of Heideggers essay concerning technology may yet seem at something
of a remove from the monstrous industrial brutality of the Final Solution and the
factories of death. And yet, if we consider Heideggers claim that what is at work in
the essence of modern technology is a type of revealing, in other words, that everything is revealed for us as through a frame, and is in that sense Enframed, we might
begin to make some inroads.15 What we must do then is look at the revealing at