Holocaust: A History by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt W.W. Norton, 480 pp., $27.95 IN RECENT DECADES thousands of books and articles about the Holocaust have been published. Practically every conceivable aspect of the tragedy has been researched and analyzed, and the question arises as to what is left to be discovered about one of the most investigated subjects in the entire field of historiography. The new history of the Holocaust by Deborah Dwork, Rose professor of Holocaust history at Clark University, and Robert Jan van Pelt, professor of cultural history in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, puts this concern to rest. Framing the Holocaust in the context of World War II and the Nazi objectives of establishing a new order in Europe, the authors provide us with a perspective that departs from previous studies on the Jewish genocide.
Although Dwork and van Pelt find harbingers of the Holocaust in the massacre of some 10,000 Jews in the wake of the First Crusade and the Medieval church’s annihilation of “heretics,” they dismiss the argument that there is a straight line from traditional anti-Judaism to the racially motivated genocidal anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Rather, they view the excesses of the “Terror” phase of the French Revolution as the precedent for not only the Holocaust, but also for the millions murdered under Stalin. The French Revolutionaries, led by “idealists” such as Robespierre, believed that the French aristocracy were obstacles to social and political change, thus justifying their execution. By killing thousands of aristocrats in the name of a better world, the revolutionaries established a precedent for the murder of groups seen as impediments to progress. The Terror, contend the authors, foreshadowed Stalin’s murder of the kulaks, whom he perceived as opponents of collectivization, and Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, whom he perceived as a barrier to a racial utopia.
Why the Jews? Anti-Semites of the early twentieth century were influenced by the ideas of nineteenth-century racial writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law and the leading proponent of racial anti-Semitism, who contended that European history was shaped by the struggle between the Nordic (Aryan) and Semitic races. In Chamberlain’s telling, the Nordic races had proved successful on the battlefield against the likes of the Persians, Carthage, and the Ottoman Empire, but the Semites had triumphed in one crucial respect: They had imposed Christianity, a Semitic religion, on the Nordic peoples of Europe. Hitler’s forerunners were determined to undo this Semitic influence on the Nordic races, even if this meant eliminating Christianity or educating the masses to believe that Jesus was an Aryan and not a Jew. The restoration of a nation–bound by blood, soil, and the pre-Christian religion of the Aryan people–became a primary objective of the Nazis. Jews not only had no place in this idealized racial utopia, but were depicted as parasites who polluted the blood and cultural fabric of the Volk. For racial nationalists like Chamberlain and the Völkisch movement’s Dietrich Eckart, to whom Hitler dedicated “Mein Kampf,” the removal of the Jews from the German landscape was an obsession.
Along with Christianity, the Nazis rejected the tenets of the Enlightenment, which had led to the emancipation of the Jews in Western Europe. As the authors note, Hitler charged that the Jews used the ideals of the Enlightenment–equality of citizens before the law, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of the press, constitutional government, and so on–“as wedges to dissolve the old bonds that had ensured stability. . . . The chaos they thus created prepared society for Bolshevism.” Hitler equated Bolshevism with Judaism, much as the medieval world equated the Jews with the devil, and he believed that their removal from German society was necessary if the nation was to fulfill its historic destiny of creating a racial utopia. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 marked the initial attempt to segregate Jews from German society, and subsequent policies aimed to remove them from the planet. Indeed, as the authors note, Hitler warned that if the Nuremberg Laws did not end “Jewish agitation both within Germany and the international sphere,” he would be forced to find “a final solution” to the “Jewish Problem.” This was the first mention of the infamous term that became a euphemism for the Holocaust.
ALTHOUGH HISTORIANS have established the uniqueness of the Jewish genocide, they have struggled to explain the motive behind the deaths of the five to six million “others” annihilated by the Nazis. Dwork and van Pelt, however, succeed at documenting how such deaths were not only contemplated in Nazi war plans, but considered acceptable and militarily necessary. Convinced that severe food shortages on the home front had contributed to Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Nazis concluded that “any means to that end was justified. . . . Germans needed the food and their foes could starve to death.” The result was a policy that made tens of millions of Slavs superfluous. The Nazis reasoned that “efforts to save the [Slavic] population from starving to death by bringing in surplus food from the black soil region of Russia can only be made at the expense of feeding Europe, and . . . would undermine Germany’s ability to hold out in the war.” The authors reveal that thousands of directives to this effect were distributed among civil servants and military personnel, implementing genocide for reasons of economy and geopolitics, rather than racial ideology.
Jews, on the other hand, were targeted on racial grounds. The Nazi decision, following the occupation of Poland in 1939, to establish a “Jewish State,” wherein some 3 million Jews would be thrust into the Lublin region, where they were doomed to die either from famine or frost, was tantamount to genocide. When the Nisko Plan was aborted, the next scheme was to resettle the Jews in Madagascar, where both the inhospitable climate and the lack of resources would similarly condemn them to death. Both proposals had as their end the annihilation of European Jewry, not, as some historians argue, simply the relocation of European Jewry. Thus, Hitler’s wish to kill the Jews preceded his decision to mass-murder them once the invasion of the Soviet Union commenced in June 1941.
BY CHRISTMASTIME OF THAT YEAR, the Germans had officially abandoned the “territorial solution” to the “Jewish Problem,” and turned to their direct annihilation. The murder of six million Jews, including men, women, and children, could not have occurred without the willing participation of German soldiers and their auxiliaries from various European countries who not only followed orders, but were constantly reminded of the righteousness of their murderous deeds. Nazi propaganda characterized Jews as typhus-bearing vermin who must be segregated, if not killed, lest they spread disease.
In Poland, as Jews were crowded into ghettos and deprived of not only food, but also soap, the Germans tried to transform Jews into the caricatures that Goebbels had depicted in such films of incitement as “The Eternal Jew” (1940). Jews were forced to exchange their warm clothes for old garments and, unable to wash properly, they became the shabby and apparently depraved subhumans portrayed in German propaganda for more than a decade.
The unfolding Holocaust involved the entire bureaucracy of Nazi Germany. As the authors note, German bureaucrats “reveled in being small cogs in a great machine. . . . Technical competence, not moral responsibility, was valued by bureaucrats and administrators alike. No one valued the questions: ‘Why are we doing this? Why should we do this?’ And no one asked them.” Yet by comparison with Romanians, the Nazis engaged in relatively “civilized” behavior when it came to killing Jews. The authors describe the Romanian massacres of Jews as “explosions of extreme violence, viciousness, and perverted sadism.” Unlike the Germans, the Romanians lacked the technology of destruction that would guarantee the systematic murder of every last targeted Jew. Nevertheless, for three days, from January 21 to 23, 1941, the Romanian Iron Guard pillaged and sacked the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, destroying seven large synagogues and murdering hundreds. Mutilated corpses littered the city morgue, and “bodies hung like cattle carcasses in the municipal slaughterhouse. Smeared with blood, a girl of five hung from a hook by her feet like a calf.” Nazi soldiers were shocked by the barbaric behavior of the Romanians. Heinrich Himmler, by contrast, prided himself on his civilized approach to the annihilation of the Jews. In fact, he claimed that everything his men did, they did in the name of civilization.
The gas chamber was Himmler’s proudest achievement. Concerned that his troops would become savage neurotics because of the mass killing of their Jewish victims, Himmler constructed at Auschwitz-Birkenau a gas chamber and crematoria that worked in tandem. The result was a killing facility in which slave laborers handled the dead and burned the bodies in the crematoria, thus eliminating the necessity for the killers to face their prey. As Dwork and van Pelt write, “with so little direct contact between killer and victim, who could be held responsible? Everyone had an out: everyone can say what he did was not so important. And everyone did say it.”
Toward the conclusion of this informative history, the authors make the observation that because of the Allied victory, some of those condemned to death never got caught in the German net. Yet some 80 percent of the Jews in Nazi Europe were annihilated by May 1945. Had the Allies not been victorious, or had victory come at a later time, many others the Germans had targeted for death would have been murdered. For those who survived the Holocaust, the Allied policy of “salvation with victory” was the only means by which they were able to outlast their tormentors.
Jack Fischel is chairman of the history department at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and author of “The Holocaust” and “The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust.”
