Bird Droppings or Catastrophe?

History is almost always argued over as a distribution of guilt. The victims appear in it as numbers.

I. Two Sentences

In June 2018 Alexander Gauland said that Hitler and the Nazis were “just a bird dropping in more than a thousand years of successful German history”. Almost eighty years earlier, in 1940, shortly before his death while fleeing, Walter Benjamin wrote of the angel of history: where we perceive a chain of events, he sees “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”.

The two sentences seem to have nothing in common. One belittles, the other sees nothing but wreckage. But both do the same thing: they speak of history as a whole, as a balance sheet or as a doom. Who died in it, one sees in neither sentence.

II. The Dispute over Guilt

In October the German Historical Museum in Berlin opened an exhibition of a kind never seen before: “Contested Kinship. Colonial and National Socialist Violence”. Some 580 objects show that camps, forced labour, mass murder and even industrial extermination belonged to European history long before there was a Hitler. Italy dropped poison gas from aircraft in Abyssinia. In Bengal in 1943 millions of people were left to starve while the country went on delivering grain to the British army.

Hardly had the exhibition opened when the dispute began that it had itself foreseen. May one compare? Whoever compares relativises, say some. Whoever does not compare spares the other perpetrators, say others. It has been like this since the German historians’ dispute of 1986. Some speak of a “guilt cult” drummed into the Germans. Others see in the Nazis merely the European colonial masters who brought their methods home; this is how Aimé Césaire saw it in 1950. Still others insist on the uniqueness of the German crime.

All these positions argue over the same question: how much guilt who bears. It is a dispute among the descendants of the perpetrators over the ranking of their ancestors. The victims appear in it, but as evidence. Their number is held up against another number.

III. What the Victims Have in Common

Read the same history from the side of the victims, and the picture shifts.

The Herero and Nama who in 1904 were driven into the Omaheke desert and died of thirst there have no names in our archives, only a number that historians still dispute. The people in King Leopold’s Congo whose hands were cut off when their village delivered too little rubber we know from photographs whose subjects nobody named. The dead of Bengal are a range between two and three million. For the murdered Jews of Europe, Yad Vashem has gathered millions of names over decades. That is the exception, and it came not from the perpetrators but from the survivors and their descendants.

What the victims have in common is not the motive of the perpetrators. It is that, for those who did it, they were not people with names but a category: natives, coolies, subhumans, vermin. And that most of those who took part never saw them.

IV. The Difference, and What Stays the Same

This does not mean that everything was the same. In his review of the exhibition Alan Posener named the difference precisely. The colonial masters considered the subjugated inferior, and that was the justification for exploiting them. To the Jews, by contrast, people attributed superhuman malice and power, a conspiracy bent on ruling the world. That is why the aim was not exploitation but annihilation, even against one’s own advantage. In the middle of the war the deportations tied up trains and personnel, and skilled workers were murdered who would have been needed in the armaments factories. Colonial violence had a purpose outside itself. The annihilation of the Jews was its own purpose.

Something else stays the same. In 1989, in “Modernity and the Holocaust”, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described how the murder was organised: as a division of labour. The official who wrote a list, the railwayman who drew up a timetable, the chemist who supplied an agent, each did only his part. None saw the whole, and hardly any saw a victim. The longer the chain, the easier each single link becomes.

The Nazis did not invent this division of labour. It comes from colonial administration, from the factory, from the army. And it did not disappear with them.

V. It Has Not Stopped

After 1945 the word was: never again. Then came Algeria, Kenya, Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, and in these years Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. None of these cases is Auschwitz, and none has to be in order to be a crime.

The Congo has not stopped either. A hundred and twenty years ago rubber was taken from there for Europe’s tyres. Today cobalt is dug there for the batteries of our phones and cars, often with child labour, under conditions we know from reports and forget when we buy. None of us has done anything to anyone. We merely stand at the end of a long chain.

And the chain is getting longer. Whoever steers a drone today sits thousands of kilometres away. Whoever designates a target is increasingly offered it by a machine that delivers hundreds of targets in hours, as we described in “900 Attacks”. The distance between the one who decides and the one who dies has never been so great. Bauman would have seen in this not a new barbarity but the old division of labour in perfected form.

VI. The Dirty Work

In June 2025 the German chancellor said on ZDF about Israel’s attacks on Iran: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.”

We do not wish to discuss the attack itself here. What is revealing is the sentence. Merz named three roles: the one who does the dirty work, the one who gives thanks, and “all of us”, who profit from it. A fourth role does not appear, those who are the victims. The one who gives thanks and those who profit keep clean hands. That is the division of labour Bauman speaks of, in a single sentence, spoken by the head of government of the country that claims to have studied this division of labour in crime more thoroughly than any other.

VII. What History Is

History is not a bird dropping. Whoever calls it that sets the dead off against the cathedrals and inventions, as if they stood on the same balance sheet.

But neither is it one single catastrophe. Whoever sees it that way can only look on, and that is more comfortable than it sounds.

History is a store of components that are all still there: the camp, the category, the chain, the distance, the thanks to the one who does the dirty work. The programmes change: exploitation, delusion, security. The components remain. That is why new barbarity is to be expected, not because people have become worse, but because the chains are getting longer and the distances greater.

Whoever wants to prevent it must put the victims at the centre, not the distribution of guilt. That means asking, with every decision, who stands at the other end of the chain, and giving them a name. The perpetrators never did. That was the condition that allowed them to do what they did.