The Holocaust: History & Memory

Preface

THE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST, OR SHOAH, NEEDS REVISITING in the face of continuing attempts to deny its veracity or scope. The arrest of David Irving in Austria in 2005, on the charge of Holocaust denial, served as a pointed reminder of its contentious character and, that year Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran, publicly joined the sordid ranks of the deniers. In fact, Adolf Hitler’s determination to rid Europe of Jews and what he saw as Jewish ideas in all their manifestations, was central to his ultimate goal of establishing a thousand-year Reich (German empire). The opportunity was provided by the extensive German conquests in the early stages of World War II, and the history of the Holocaust in part properly belongs to that of the war. Although this might seem an obvious point, it is challenged by the range of work on aspects of the war that underplays or ignores the Holocaust and other Jewish themes.¹ Indeed, I deliberately included a volume on the Holocaust in the seven-volume collection of articles and essays on the war by various scholars that I edited in 2007. The present book, which builds on an earlier book published in 2008, is written in part in response to the continuation of Holocaust denial and also because of the need for a short introductory study.

The spate of Holocaust denial during the 1990s and the 2000s was the clarion call for the writing and publication of my 2008 book. The context for it was: the mounting evasiveness, downplaying, and even denial of the Holocaust in certain European and non-European circles; the challenges these vexatious developments posed to Western civilization; and apprehension over what these foibles could portend for civil society. It is alarming that in the years following 2008 the implications of these developments have become even more palpable. Anti-Semitism is increasingly visible in certain European states. The book seeks to bring to readers’ attention—through direct, detailed, and thematically oriented prose—the backdrop, the events, and the history of memories and perspectives of the Holocaust, so as to educate readers and would-be sceptics of one of the most defining events of World War II and the modern era, and warn them of the costs of ignoring it. This study clearly demonstrates the perils that flow from embracing historical fallacies and inattentiveness, and the horrendous civilizational costs that result from such acceptances.

The complex roots of the slaughter are discussed in the first two chapters. The German extermination policies that led to the Holocaust that consumed much of European Jewry were the culmination of powerful currents in nineteenth-century thought, as refracted through the prism of Nazi ideology and Hitler’s messianic fantasies. There is an emphasis in the book on the extent to which Hitler’s military strategy and the one-sided genocidal war against Jews cannot be detached from each other. Indeed, the slaughter of Jews should be part of the analysis of the German conduct of the war. This study underlines the importance of the killings by Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), especially mass shootings, alongside the more usual emphasis on the slaughter in the extermination camps.

This slaughter reflected the extent to which the war was a brutal struggle between different visions and practices of modernism and modernization: Nazi ideology, therefore, was at once anti-modernist in that it sought to destroy other visions and practices, but also had modernist visions and practices in its own way. In Nazi minds, Jews represented, and personified, at once an anachronistic past, in their traditional customs and separateness from the modern unitary nation but, also, far more dangerously, a different modernism. Or rather modernisms, for Jews were seen by the Nazis as highly prominent in, and shaping, if not directing, capitalism, Communism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, socialism, and much of modern culture and thought. This Nazi paranoia captures the extent to which Jews were spread across much of the world and, particularly, allegedly prominent in its most dominant economy and most active culture, the United States. Moreover, although many Jews were not part of modernization, a large number, especially among those who assimilated, were influential precisely because they were involved in modern and liberal projects. The role of Jews in both physics and Hollywood was indicative of the wider situation.

The Holocaust is also of separate significance, not only as the most brutal episode of anti-Semitism and a warning of where that most stupid of attitudes can lead, but as a formative background to the creation and ethos of the state of Israel. The Holocaust is also an indication of where ethnic and organic notions of the state can proceed. The treatment of the Holocaust in these pages requires explanation because so much space is devoted to postwar discussion and memorialization (a lengthy Chapter 5) and to consideration of the Holocaust today (Chapter 6). This emphasis is not in pursuit of some absurd postmodern relativism but, rather, because the subject of the Holocaust is, at once, the brutal mass slaughter of the Jews perpetrated by the Germans and their allies and, yet, also the postwar consideration of this slaughter. Discussion of the consideration does not in any way lessen the slaughter, but simply notes that, as personal recollection fades with the passing generation, it is through this consideration that the Holocaust is grasped. It is, for example, through postwar films, such as Schindler’s List (1993), as much as, if not far more than, through wartime photography, that the Holocaust is understood visually, and that process is increasingly important—both for a society for which the visual is supplanting the literary as means and medium of thought, and in order to confront the widespread loss of shock. Given the dominance of German documentation for the surviving written official sources on the Holocaust, the subsequent publication of memoirs and the visual account are of even greater consequence. Free showings for schools of Schindler’s List in the United States helped make it an apparently canonical text on the Holocaust.

Moreover, memorialization of the Holocaust throws light on postwar societies, on the contentious nature of World War II, and on the persistence of anti-Semitism. As such, however ahistorically, it also offers gleams of understanding about the policies and attitudes that made the Holocaust not only possible but also a terrible reality. Thus, the Holocaust was not only an event, but also a process with short-term and long-term implications. This was also the historical situation, as the Holocaust reflected not only short-term elements but also a multiplicity of factors that ranged more widely in time.

How this situation and process was then treated by subsequent generations is of major significance. Most obviously, in postwar Germany and among its wartime allies, recognition of the Holocaust was often suppressed or minimized in an attempt to minimize connivance in, or acceptance of, the treatment of Jews.

Since writing my earlier study in 2007, I have had the opportunity for additional work, not least as a result of visits to Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Europe is covered with sites and, increasingly, memorials and museums. Each is different—Salonika (Thessaloniki) is not Paris—reflecting not only the contrasting experiences of the local Jews, but also styles and contexts of memorialization. The common theme is loss; the loss of individual life, the loss of Jewish communities, and the loss for Europe.

It is both appropriate to be emotive when writing about the Holocaust—how else to treat genocide, an abstraction that means smashing living babies’ skulls against walls—and, yet, that emotional response also is both less and more than the story.

Compared to the horror of the subject, the problems posed by toponyms (place names) is of lesser consequence and certainly were not responsible for the persistent painful headache I had while researching and writing this book. Nevertheless, given that some seem to find the spelling of place names a more serious topic, it is important to note that these are arbitrary realities imbued with implicit national or ethnic narratives often divergent from, if not in outright opposition to, other narratives. The spelling of Eastern European toponyms can automatically be taken as a diminution, neglect, or even denigration, of another people’s calamity. Indeed, the conundrum of Eastern European history is seen with the issue of how to express sensitively multiple narratives of suffering and memory without short-changing engraved, collective historical memories and causing offense through what will always be an arbitrary choice for toponymic selection. There is no easy resolution since, typically, everything has a name, names do mean a lot, and one must choose a name. The magnitude of Eastern European suffering can overwhelm even the most conscientious lexicographical and syntactical formulations of historians.

Take Kaunas (Yiddish: Kovne; Polish: Kowno; Russian: Kovno), currently the second-largest city in Lithuania after Vilnius (Yiddish: Vilne; Polish: Wilno; Russian: Vil’na). Kaunas was the Lithuanian capital during the interwar period. Disconcertingly pleasant when I visited, Kovno, like Vilnius, was a Holocaust execution site and thus inscribed in Jewish memory. However, historians generally adopt as place names the political–administrative formulations currently found on up-to-date maps and employed by whatever states govern particular places. As Kaunas was named, and continues to be named Kaunas since the creation of a Lithuanian state in 1918 and during the existence of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kaunas, not Kovno, should be used. Moreover, Kaunas is the older name, since it dates at least to the thirteenth century. At the same time, the 1941 Kovno massacres is a term that is employed to describe the slaughter of Jews in Kaunas.

In light of the likely readership of this book, footnote references are restricted to English-language literature. There is also extensive and important scholarship in German, and the quality of much of this literature in recent years is among the few heartening signs to emerge from this mentally difficult subject. Readers who wish to pursue this literature can consult the footnotes and bibliographies of the English-language literature.

I have benefited from the comments of Pete Brown, Guy Chet, David Cohen, Jonathan Dent, Robert Freedman, Bill Gibson, Manfred Henningen, Peter Hoffenberg, Jeremy Noakes, Sam Rosen, Rick Schneid, and Daniel Snowman on an earlier draft, and of Ian Bickerton and Herb London on part of an earlier draft. I would like to thank Peter Barber, Ron Blumer, David Caesarini, Robert Gildea, Rob Morgan, Luisa Quartermaine, Kaushik Roy, Satsuma Shinsuke, and Nick Terry for advice on particular points. I greatly appreciate the major commitment and the large amount of time this effort involves. I would like to thank Mike Mosbacher for giving me permission to use material from my earlier, 2008, work for the Social Affairs Unit on the Holocaust. I am grateful for the opportunity to lecture at the University of Hawaii on the subject.

This book is dedicated to a branch of my family I only knew through flickering memories and fading photographs in my grandmother’s flat. She was a lovely woman and a very kind grandmother and great-grandmother.

THE

HOLOCAUST

ONE

Until Barbarossa

ANTI-SEMITIC BACKGROUND

In a horrific form, the Holocaust, particularly the extermination and concentration camps, testified to a persistent and widespread use of concepts of race in order to rank peoples and to develop and express national cohesion. This was more common in the political thought and practice of the twentieth century than is generally appreciated and was particularly important in state-building and also in the creation of new political allegiances.

In Europe, toward the close of the nineteenth century, the proponents of increasingly insistent organic notions of the nation became readier to draw on, if not create, an often-mystical sense of identity between people and place or, as it more generally was expressed, between race and country. Organic notions of the nation drew on, and sustained, a range of potent political and cultural notions and ideas, including Romanticism and Social Darwinism and, in turn, they fed into early Fascism. The corresponding claim that peoples’ thoughts and actions did not follow universal and timeless patterns but, instead, were shaped by time and place, lent itself to the idea of distinctive cultures. This stress on distinctive cultures could be part of an antihumanistic ideology, although the latter was to stem, in the Nazi case, more from the claim that racial characteristics were timeless; or potentially timeless as they were subject to change that might most obviously threaten purity of blood.

The stress on distinctive cultures potentially undermined universalism and, thus, the idea of tolerance and rights for others; and this undermining was certainly apparent in the Nazi case. The organizing narrative, instead, became the nation. Although, in particular cultures, that approach could encompass a strong commitment to tolerance, the function of history as a process and subject often became that of providing the vision of a single people with a national destiny, a destiny that linked past, present, and future and that demanded sacrifices. The emphasis on nations was linked to the belief in the nation, the latter being frequently, though not always, presented as necessarily different from, and superior to, other nations. This emphasis affected attitudes to those who could be seen and defined as weakening the nation: the enemy within made it harder to deal with the rival abroad. International rivalry encouraged this analysis.

Concern about the enemy within was linked to a politics of paranoia. The conspiracy theories that had been pushed to the fore in Europe at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s, a period in which there was a widespread belief in secret societies, some allegedly long-lasting, influenced the subsequent account of both present politics and the recent past. Earlier concerns about secret movements, notably the Freemasons and the Illuminati, both supposedly responsible for the French Revolution, were played through a new context from the 1790s, and these concerns were made more open and democratic, in large part through the culture of print and rising literacy.¹