II.8. Carl Schmitt, de l’accréditation de la Shoah à sa négation

Abstract

We know that the intellectual and political path of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and public and international law theorist, was marked by his active participation in the justification of Nazism. In this article, we look at the role that ideas played in the process that led to the extermination. On this point, I do not believe that we may claim, as did Hermann Rauschning, that National Socialism was pure activism. For the possibility of the Final Solution and its implementation to exist, the ideas of isolation, concentration and later extermination had to have been accredited and approved, even passively, as inevitable, useful and even desirable. This accreditation and approval, however passive, depended on the existence of justifications. It can be said that Schmitt participated in the accreditation of the concentration camp imprisonment and the extermination. In my opinion, his concept of the race enemy, formulated starting in 1933, played an important role in the definition of the irreducible enemy of Germany, which I have called the substantial enemy in order to distinguish it from the relational enemy: the Jew.Much less known is the fact that not only did Schmitt support the Nazi regime by providing theoretical and legal justifications for it, but he also became the first negationist after the war, calling into question what he called “the criminalization of the [German] war.” His was not a historical negationism intended to question the existence of the concentration and extermination camps and therefore of the gas chambers, which he never mentioned. That kind of negationism was to come later on. Instead, Schmitt’s was a theoretical negationism that consisted of switching the direction of the criminalization process.