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Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Indeed, even in a post-Second World War publication such as The Peace, we find
Jnger still insisting on the centrality and importance of this notion to any understanding of that particular period in the worlds history:
Behind the bloody battle lines, which for the first time welded the earths ball with
glowing bands, stretched the grey lightless depths of the army of workers. In them
the greatest sum of human endeavor was produced that men have ever harnessed
to one end.62

Heidegger himself describes how, under the ordinances of revealing issued through
Gestell, everything everywhere is ordered to stand by, everything is revealed as resource
to be used, on call and ready for use. In the passage above we read of a conversion
of life into energy and the way in which everything is reduced to its capacity to be
mobilized. However, Jnger looks to offer an historical and socio-political account
for this situation where Heidegger sees all of this as the result of the unfolding of the
history of Western Metaphysics. Granted, Jngers descriptions and chronicling of the
symptoms bear a clear resemblance to both Heidegger and Spengler what is called
for under total mobilization is extension to the deepest marrow; nevertheless, in his
later essay (The Peace), Jnger proposes a causal account which Heidegger would again
clearly oppose:
In the course of these fateful years engagements were to take place which were far
more terrible than the battles of materiel and fire of the first world war. For the
man who believes he fights for ideas and ideals is possessed by greater ruthlessness
than he who merely defends his countrys frontiers.63

For Jnger, this explains some of the most obscene catastrophes of the Second World
War in a way which Heidegger approaches rather from the standpoint of the growing
dominion of Gestell:
Over wide plains and fields the terrors of the elements vied with a technology
of murder and unshakeable cruelty. There were areas where men destroyed each
other like vermin and broad woods in which to hunt men like wolves. And one
saw, cut off from all hope as if on a dead star, great armies go to their death in the
horror chambers of pocket battles Even more somber becomes the picture of
suffering in those places where the world turned into a mere slaughterhouse, to a
flayinghouse whose stench poisoned the air far and wide.64

Indeed, Jngers powers of description are chilling as he characterizes what we might

describe as the symptoms of Gestell in the context of persecution and oppression:
the way to the peaks had many stations. Particularly terrifying were the cold
mechanics of persecution, the considered technique of decimation, the tracking
and surveillance of the victims by means of lists and files of a police force which
swelled into armies. It seemed as if every method, every discovery of the human
mind had been transformed into an instrument of oppression.65

If we recall our discussion of Heideggers essay on technology and his agriculture

remark we can see that Heidegger could easily be taken to be implying something