“For twelve years, in God’s stead, Satan ruled Nazi-occupied Europe.”
― Emil Fackenheim
There can be no single interpretation of the Holocaust. No event so all-consumingly destructive could inspire unified understanding. Among the few common threads in responses to the Holocaust are two questions: why and how. How could this have come to pass? And why did no one stop it? Those are historical questions, with social, political, and military answers. Despite their answerability, they are distinctly unsatisfying, especially to Jewish survivors of the Nazi regime. For that group, the central question that accurately addresses the unsurprising inability to understand the Holocaust is a different one: where was God? Based not upon facticity but upon faith, this question does better to address the bewilderment of survivors. However, this question is still slightly inaccurate—not to mention unanswerable. Such an act of evil as the Holocaust cannot be brought to God for justification. Instead, one must ask Satan, and many have. Among them are Elie Wiesel, Emil Fackenheim, and Hannah Arendt, all of whom are Holocaust survivors, who each posit drastically different answers to that question. Despite their differences, none of them are wrong. Instead, their widely varied understandings reflect the impossibility of bringing a singular answer to the central question raised by the Holocaust, and the necessary reframing of the question of God’s absence. Instead, they ask, “Where was Satan?”
Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God (as It Was Held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) is a simple narrative: after a devastating pogrom, a group of traveling players decides to put God to trial in the empty village inn. After a lengthy and unresolved argument over who God’s defense attorney will be, Satan enters the tavern as the godly counsel. The contextual connection to the Holocaust here is clear. Wiesel, who was born in 1928 in a shtetl in Romania, was deported to Auschwitz with his family in 1944. There, he worked as a slave laborer at Buna-Monowitz, and was eventually forced on a death march to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in 1945. After the war, Wiesel became one of the most prolific authors about the Holocaust, writing memoirs, plays, novels, and books of philosophy. All of his works detail how thoroughly the Holocaust affected him and the world. His most famous book, Night, discusses in part how his religion was shattered by the war: “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” Among the plays Wiesel wrote is The Trial of God, which transports Wiesel’s experiences of the Holocaust to a shtetl called Shamgorod in the Pale of Settlement in 1649. It is perhaps Wiesel’s most direct response to the question of Satanic evil in the Holocaust.
In The Trial of God, Satan is a minor character, appearing only in the third and final act. Instead of being called to take part in the trial, though, he volunteers as God’s defense attorney, a role which he plays honestly and with great conviction. Satan appears in human form, with the name Sam, visually no different from any other character. He is, according to the character list, “Still young.” Sam, in Wiesel’s play, is not a particularly complex character. He is not physically monstrous, he is not maniacal or scheming, he is not slimy or serene. What he is, though, is present, which is nearly unique in the play. Almost nothing remains after the pogrom in The Trial of God. There are almost no survivors—we do not even see their bodies. There are no authorities cleaning up, there are almost no patrons at the inn, there is no audience for the troupe’s play and, most importantly, there is no God. Despite innumerable mentions of God’s name, pleas for assistance, and legal indictment, God never appears. Unlike The Trial of God’s ideological predecessor, The Book of Job, the actors’ arraignment of God falls on deaf (or nonexistent) ears. Wiesel’s point here is clear: in the Holocaust, which the Shamgorod pogrom is a metaphor for, and perhaps in all of history, God was absent. But Satan was not. To Wiesel, the horrors of the Holocaust were exclusively diabolical in nature. In the final moment of the play, Sam (now referred to in the script as Satan) raises his arms, and invites the second wave of the pogrom to come crashing down. Despite what the villagers believed, God would never intervene, because God is nonexistent or uncaring.
For Wiesel, the Holocaust was not the creation of an evil or reluctant God, it was a product of the all-consuming dominance of Satan in a quasi-Nietzschean post-Godly world. Moreover, The Trial of God’s Satan is remarkably unknowable—even the final revelation of his machinations is unclear. Did he incite the pogrom? Did he forestall it? Sam’s defense of God is also riddled with opacity. His primary argumentative tool is to protest against the notion of questioning God in the first place, asking “What do you know of God that enables you to denounce Him?” Sam, of course, does not ask genuinely; the question is unanswerable. Instead, he obscures the true absence of God by dismissing God’s responsibility to justify history because of his extreme unknowability. Since this unknowable God is effectively indistinguishable from a nonexistent God, the question turns then to the existence or nonexistence of Satan. Like God, the Satan in The Trial of God is completely unknowable—his mysteriousness and litigious sliminess obscure everything of his true existence. For Wiesel, though, Satan’s unknowability did not reveal any distance from the world or nonexistence. Instead, for Wiesel, Satan was determinably real, and earthly. For Wiesel, Satan was literally the organizer of the Holocaust. He sat at the Wannsee Conference, at Ponary, at Auschwitz—like Sam in The Trial of God, he executed the killing himself.
A similar but far from identical understanding of Satan’s role in the Holocaust can be found in Emil Fackenheim’s philosophy. Fackenheim, who was born in Halle, Germany, in 1916, was arrested on Kristallnacht and interned briefly at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After his release, he fled to England and was then deported to Canada, where he was interned once again as an enemy alien. After the war, he served as a rabbi in the Reform community. Eventually, his career transitioned more to philosophy, through which he tried to understand the place of the Holocaust in the progression of Judaism as a religion. Answering that question required determining the role of Satan in Jewish history, including during the Holocaust.
In his philosophy, as compiled by Kenneth Hart Green in The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim, Fackenheim describes the presence of Satan as a negative revelation, wherein the Holocaust’s ultimate consequence was the revelation of the “radical absence of the divine in history,” wherein God’s total nonexistence in humanity was made obvious by the density of evil of the Holocaust, and the lack of any preternatural intervention. On the surface, that is a very similar outlook to Wiesel’s. However, Fackenheim envisions Satan slightly differently: to him, Satan was not an independent physical orchestrater like Sam in The Trial of God, but an intangible “force greater than man albeit working in and through man.” Essentially, Fackenheim characterizes the Holocaust as “an eruption of demonism into history.” This is particularly interesting because it reveals Fackenheim’s at least nominal belief in unearthly forces, but only demonic ones. This “eruption of demonism” is the extent of supernaturality that Fackenheim accepts, drawing the line at any sort of God who might intervene in history on the behalf of goodness. For Fackenheim, God is nonexistent because God is nonexistent, not because of an impossibility of the supernatural. This is not true of Satan. However, Fackenheim avoids diminishing the human responsibility for the Holocaust. Instead, as he understands it, “the satanic will, or diabolical element in history, is not outside man, but inside certain men who chose evil actions.” Fackenheim is very careful to maintain this distinction. For example, Fackenheim does not capitalize “satanic” to avoid personifying with a proper noun the inanimate satanic force at work in the Holocaust. The other aspect of Fackenheim’s philosophy is his approach to the consequences of the Holocaust as an act of evil. Beyond revealing the absence of God and the ever-presence of Satan, the Holocaust revealed that “Minimally, what became real at Auschwitz was always possible,” and that “Maximally, Auschwitz…made possible what previously was impossible; for it is a precedent.” For Fackenheim, there was nothing inhuman about the Holocaust. Instead, the event was a definitionally human cataclysm, made extraordinary by the novelty of the scale and brutality of the suffering inflicted. Fackenheim’s answer to the question of God’s presence in the Holocaust is that God was nowhere, and a radical, intangible Satan was everywhere.
Hannah Arendt presents a very different answer to this question. In her treatise, Eichmann and the Holocaust, collected from her first-hand reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial by an Israeli high court in Jerusalem in 1961, Arendt outlines her understanding of evil during the Holocaust. Arendt, who was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, escaped the war before it began. In 1933, when she was working for the German Federation of Zionists, she was arrested by the Gestapo, and afterwards fled to France. From there, she organized evacuations of Jewish children from Germany until the Nazi invasion in 1941, when she fled to America. She was a career political and social philosopher, but also worked as a journalist. In 1961, when Adolf Eichmann was captured and tried in Jerusalem, she was hired by the New Yorker to report on the trial. Her considerations of the circumstances and effects of Eichmann’s actions and motivations constitute a unique approach to the question of evil in the Holocaust.
In Eichmann and the Holocaust, Arendt argues that the profound evil of the Holocaust was not the work of a singularly transcendent literal or metaphorical Satan, but instead the consequence of a carefully designed system which divvied up the capacity for atrocity among innumerable middlemen. She calls this idea the “banality of evil.” Arendt barely mentions Satan or the devil, since her philosophy is focused more on factual evil. That evil—which she details extensively, sparing little granularity in her descriptions of concentration camps and killing squads—was not driven by a malign external actor like in The Trial of God or by the sort of cognitive Satan described by Fackenheim. Instead, it was a social evil that pervaded Germany, too mundane to be Satanic, that drove countless individuals to produce an act of evil which was, in aggregate, greater than any other in human history. Precisely, Arendt states, “one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann.” At the same time, though, Arendt recognizes that assigning singular guilt for the Holocaust on one or a select few is an absurd reaction to the complete societal massacre that was the Holocaust: “Where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.” To reconcile this inequality, Arendt places the blame for the Holocaust squarely on a divergence from human nature: “Such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which perhaps are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” Despite the natural human capability for intentional evil, Arendt argues, banal thoughtlessness on a large social scale can propel events and systems more Satanic and destructive than those created by machinating devils. Importantly, this is not a dispelling of blame. On that point Arendt is clear, arguing that “all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.” No matter the scale of the crime and the low degree of maliciousness necessary for any individual to take part in it, at least legally, all involved are responsible. Since the responsibility is shared among the innumerable perpetrators, there is no extra blame, as it were, needing explanation. With all of the evil accounted for as having been effectively distributed across thousands and thousands of intermediaries, none remains for which Satan might take credit. That is how Arendt sees the devil in the Holocaust—though the evil was in the details, the devil was not. To Arendt, the Holocaust could have been nothing but a uniquely human endeavor. Giving Satan the credit, she argues, would be too good to us.
These three understandings of the role of Satan in the Holocaust—Arendt’s entirely human devil, Fackenheim’s ideological Satan, and Wiesel’s literal villain—reflect the incomprehensible magnitude of the destruction wrought by the Holocaust. The sheer scale of the massacre ensured that every survivor would reckon entirely differently with the decimation. For some, like Hannah Arendt, that meant emphasizing the unquestionable humanity of the Holocaust’s evil. For others, including Emil Fackenheim, a lowercase-s satan coursed through the minds of the organizers of the Holocaust and erupted into unthinkable violence. Still others believed, like Elie Wiesel, that Satan was manifestly present in the Holocaust, directly orchestrating the horror. It is impossible (and wrong) to ascribe any measure of accuracy or inaccuracy to any of these viewpoints. Instead, each is the product of individual experience. In Wiesel’s Holocaust, which was an event of his own, Satan really was there, holding up his arms like Moses at the Red Sea, directing the trains to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau. Equivalently, Fackenheim’s Holocaust surged with a Satan that was, without a doubt, a “rupture in the fabric of being, torn by man, so powerful that it constitutes a permanent threat to the divine.” In exactly the same way, Arendt’s Holocaust had no mystery about it: plainly, infinite bureaucrats with desk jobs and flimsy consciences meted out death sentences and liquidation orders. These are all equally true. As I see it, that is the true nature of the Holocaust’s unique evil.* No other cataclysm has so universally and uniquely affected its target population in so many incomparable and inconceivable ways. An incomprehensible, tangible Satan killed six million. A merely satanic spirit influenced radical evil. Satan was nowhere to be found, replaced by dead-eyed middlemen. Satan existed and was absent from the Holocaust in a million more and a million fewer ways. Each is equally true, equally distinct, and equally evil.
