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> June 1997
THE ORIGINS OF "RADICAL EVIL"
Debating the Holocaust
The publication early last year of Hitler's Willing Executioners, by American academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, sparked off a stormy debate about the destruction of the European Jews. With the book now available in French translation, the controversy continues, fuelled by a great deal of media hype. But it would be a pity if it blinded us to the rich contributions made to our understanding of the Holocaust in the first half of the 1990's, which have shed new light on the origins of the massacre, the conditions under which it was decided on and perpetrated, and the personalities and motives of the killers.
by Philippe Burrin
From 1990 to 1995, almost as many books on the persecution and extermination of the European Jews were published as in the whole period from 1945 to 1985 (1). Few of them are written in French, but German academics are now vying with their American, British and Israeli colleagues in a field greatly enlarged by the opening of the archives of the former Communist bloc, which contained mountains of German documents seized by the Soviet authorities.
The first works based on this new archive material show that the stages in the tragedy can now be reconstructed accurately, including relations between the departments of the occupation authorities, the tension between forced labour and extermination, and the attitudes of non-Jewish populations. Particular attention has been paid to the attitudes of the occupying forces themselves, a colonial society considerably affected by corruption and the progressive weakening of inhibitions against the use of violence (2).
The striking feature of this new output is the proliferation of monographs. Exploration of the terrain, inch by inch, takes priority over synthesis and interpretation (3). Countless works deal with the fate of European Jews at local, regional or national level, their daily lives under Nazi oppression, the various concentration and annihilation camps, and the attitude of the surrounding population (4). There have also been many works dealing with the other victims, notably Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, the mentally ill and homosexuals. Our steadily increasing knowledge of the treatment meted out to these groups makes it unjustifiable to consider antisemitism in isolation, ignoring the fact that it was part of a much wider racist policy (5).
While our knowledge of "how" these events occurred is becoming increasingly precise, the question "why" is the subject of sustained debate. At least two issues deserve special attention. The first, which is still giving (...)
Philippe Burrin
Translated by Barry Smerin
*Historian, Geneva
(1) Estimate based on Michael Ruck, Bibliographie zum Nazionalsozialismus, Bud-Verlag, Cologne, 1995.
(2) See the exemplary study by Dieter Pohl, Nazionsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massen-verbrechens, Oldenburg, Munich, 1996.
(3) See Michael Marrus, "Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust", Journal of Modern History, Chicago, March 1994.
(4) See Renée Poznanski, Etre juif en France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, Hachette, Paris, 1994, and Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz. La machinerie du meurtre de masse. Editions du CNRS, Paris, 1993.
(5) See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State : Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Edouard Conte and Cornelia Essner, La quête de la race : une anthropologie du nazisme, Hachette, Paris, 1995.
(6) See, on the one hand, Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide : Himmler and the Final Solution, New York, 1991, and, on the other, Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, Vienna, Europa Verlag, 1993. For an appraisal of the state of the argument, see Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
(7) See Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, op. cit.; Thomas Sandkühler, "Endlösung" in Galizien : der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941-1944, Bonn, Dietz, 1996; Götz Aly, Endlösung : Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden, Fischer, Frankurt-on-Main, 1995; and Dieter Pohl, Nazional-sozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944, op.cit. For the last two writers, the decision process took a decisive turn in October 1941.
(8) Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 1991.
(9) See Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance : "Euthanasia" in Germany c. 1900-1945, Cambridge University Press, 1994; and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide : From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1995.
(10) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Meridian Books, New York, 1958. On the modern nature of nazism, see Norbert Frei, "Wie modern war der Nazionalsozialismus?", Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Göttingen, No.3, 1993.
(11) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, New York, 1996.
(12) See the discussions in Le Débat (January-February 1997), L'Histoire (January 1997), Documents and Les Temps Modernes (February-March 1997), as well as Edouard Hussen's remarkable essay, Une culpabilité ordinaire? Hitler, les Allemands et la Shoah, François-Xavier de Guibert, Paris, 1997.
(13) Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, New York, 1992.
(14) Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1961. To the Jews killed by shooting or gassing must be added more than 800,000 who perished as a result of the living conditions imposed by the Nazis in the ghettos.
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