Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [93]
Figure 10.1. What if the South had won the Civil War? That counterfactual may hinge on a very specific question: What if George B. McClellan had not accidentally received Robert E. Lee’s battle plans wrapped in cigar paper?
Banished from the world of description, analysis, and conclusion, Auschwitz has become a myth in which the assumed universality of its impact obscures the contingencies of its beginning. The result is an account of “blissful clarity” in which there are no contradictions because statements of fact are interpreted as explanations; “things appear to mean something by themselves.”5
In the emphasized clause Van Pelt is arguing counterfactually that treating historical facts as explanations of what was inevitable is a myth. He deconstructs this myth by unraveling the contingencies that constructed the necessity that became the Auschwitz we have come to know today. The problem is that we are trying to understand the early stages of Auschwitz by what now remains. The original intention of Auschwitz was quite different. “Auschwitz was not preordained to become the major site of the Holocaust. It acquired that role almost by accident, and even the fact that it became a site of mass murder at all was due more to the failure to achieve one goal than to the ambition to realize another.”6 Auschwitz became a killing machine because of a historical counterfactual—the failure to achieve its original goal. The focus on Auschwitz’s final stage, in fact, has prevented us from explicating its contingent history, as well as how ordinary men became criminals.
We think of it as a concentration camp enclosed on itself, separated from the rest of the world by “night” and “fog.” This almost comfortable demonization relegates the camp and the events that transpired there to the realm of myth, distancing us from all too concrete historical reality, suppressing the local, regional, and national context of the greatest catastrophe Western civilization both permitted and endured, and obscuring the responsibility of the thousands of individuals who enacted this atrocity step by step. None of them was born to be a mass murderer, or an accomplice to mass murder. Each of them inched his way to iniquity.7
Yet all the while, says Van Pelt, “the extermination of the Jews was meant to be a transient phenomenon in the history of the camp.” Plans were continued to convert the camp yet again after the war, but “that other future never materialized. Thus the name Auschwitz became synonymous with the Holocaust, and not with Himmler’s model town.”8 (See figure 10.2.)
That “other future” is the counterfactual Auschwitz, the model (and modal) town that Auschwitz might have been were it not for the historical antecedents in our time line. It is almost impossible not to think counter-factually, as Van Pelt does in rewinding the time line back even further: “Founded by Germans in 1270, Auschwitz was lost to the Reich in 1457 and, as it went to Austria, almost returned in 1772. It would have had the history of any other border town, but for the late-nineteenth-century German obsession with what was called ‘the German East.’”9 It would have . . . but for is classic counterfactual reasoning, and when you start looking for such counterfactuals in works of history they are pervasive, as historian