Translated from MSZ 11-1988

What German historians think of the persecution of the Jews

The approximately 40-year-old national education program called “coming to terms with the past” has radically fostered humanism. With very few exceptions, the West German spirit has been distanced from the rule of its legal predecessor, and for primarily humanitarian reasons. This is because hardly any of the embodiments of this spirit – from the heights of science down to the people – know which principles and standards of state rule to attribute fascist racism to, but are all in terrible agreement that the Third Reich did wrong with its “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: Apparently everyone is content to obey a democracy that achieves its goals without pogroms, concentration camps and other “disgraceful deeds” – and so it must be quite humane. And apparently this kind of contentment can’t get enough of itself. Because as finished as the humanist-democratic assessment and condemnation of the German past may be, if it deems the morally unifying diagnosis that ranges from “horrible” and “inhumane” to “terrible” and “appalling” appropriate – it is far from over, and certain differences are also emerging.

For the majority of democratic humanists, there is plenty of edifying material for their noble sentiments and a range of offers to find the fascist abyss fascinating and entertaining: Whether in a family series, photo essay or newspaper report – the “shocking” is relished as enthralling, the “inconceivably dreadful” has an indulgent nutritional value if one imagines being there in the middle of it, the horror titillates the mind as someone’s life story and the gassed corpses as images in the news.

In comparison with these rather indulgent forms of coming to terms with the present, a minority of democratic humanists stand out due to another need served by fascism: German historians can never know precisely and satisfyingly enough about the disasters of “nationalist tyranny.” The reason for this is not factual, but rather because when historians think about fascism they ask highly peculiar questions, and these provide a lasting source of research material in their own way:

“The Final Solution”: “Madness” – intentional or improvised?
“Crime” – unique or comparable?

If one takes an inventory of the research on the National Socialist extermination of the Jews, it is immediately apparent that it is completely unanimous in dealing with extremely strange points of contention. The main theme is “reconstructing the decision making” and the central “research problem” is the question

“whether the murder of the Jews was on Hitler’s initiative or resulted from the anti-Jewish measures of the National Socialists cumulatively . . . How, when and where, and if so by whom, was the decision or decisions made to kill the European Jews, in what order and by what means?” (Jäckel III, p. 11)

Who of those responsible for the flourishing of the German people in those days agreed to the physical extermination of the Jews; when was this decision made – in 1924 in Hitler’s prison cell in Landsberg or only at the ominous Wannsee Conference in 1942 or somewhere in between or actually never? – these questions have nothing to do with its content, so a deep dive into the modalities of the decision making can never provide any clarity about the nature of this decision. The historians’ guild is unanimous in seeing this quite differently:

Some argue that “the development of Hitler’s anti-Semitism can be traced in a sequence of stages” (Hillgruber I, p. 221), assuming that “the major decisions in the history of the Third Reich” should be grasped in terms of its “doctrinal programmatic core” (ibid., p. 220) and that the act, which is declared to be fundamental, can be traced back to the intention to do it in the form of Hitler’s fixed idea:

“The removal of the Jews was Hitler’s oldest goal. He had already written in a letter dated September 16, 1919, the first political document of his life . . .” (Jäckel II, p. 89)

“One therefore has reason to believe that the Jewish question initially and perhaps for the rest of his life preoccupied Hitler more than foreign policy.” (Jäckel I, p. 155)

Others want to see it the other way around: To them, the events appear more to be more or less random ad hoc reactions to the various twists and turns of daily politics, which is why they are interpreted “as functions of social processes.”

“It was Hitler’s second nature, so to speak, to only make decisions when the situation seemed overripe. . . The Holocaust was not based on a long term program. It was a perfect improvisation that emerged from earlier planning stages and escalated them.” (Mommsen, p. 235 and p. 277)

It doesn’t really matter what the decision was; what is required here is neither an explanation of the fascist ideas about the people, state and race which wanted to see so-called national parasites eliminated for the sake of the purity and political reliability of the body politic, nor an explanation of why this made such uncanny sense to so many well-behaved, civically educated subjects: The historical argument here is simply called “function” and is the confident proclamation that historians do not need to know the reason for a thing in order to regard it as justified in any case. This abstract invocation of the extermination of the Jews as in no way coincidental is the not overly substantive scientific connection to the common sense idea that it must have been a perverse atrocity that may be related to God and the world, just not to politics and the “German model” of the time. Because it knows nothing about its subject matter, but wants to make it plausible that it must have existed, this “approach” ends up trivializing racism as a “phraseology” that was not meant to be taken seriously, as a “mere worldview instrument” that was not intended to be used in practice, which therefore must not have been intended as a feature of the state affairs of the time, but for something completely different (such as something as innocent as “faith in the future”).

Because it is a foregone conclusion that anti-Semitism is an unpolitical ideology in the West and that the extermination of the Jews can therefore have nothing whatsoever to do with politics and nationhood, these two theoretical variants of the Holocaust’s origins flesh out the unifying ideology according to which the “non-political” actually must have nevertheless become political under fascism: For this purpose alone, the silliest trivialities such as the time, persons and modalities of the decision to solve the “Jewish problem” become all-important pivotal points of research because they allow us to pinpoint the quite extraordinary historical circumstances that would have opened the door in politics for this “irrational ideology.”

From the anti-Semitic tradition of the 19th century, which condensed into Hitler’s fanatical worldview in the 1920s and later crept into politics through this person, to the “conflicts within the system” (Mommsen, p. 262) which are said to have driven the “verbal anti-Semitic rhetoric,” which in itself was not at all serious, to its realization, everything was then right for making this one ideology plausible, which at its core is also very familiar to every non-historian.

The “Final Solution” was this too: one war too many!

This state moral presupposed in these fantasies – that the Holocaust must have nothing to do with politics, but a great deal to do with deformations of politics related to its times – is routinely supplemented with a very revealing “realistic” addition. In the final instance, this presupposition is based on the suspicion that the Nazis did not actually master the business of state power. Democratic expertise conceives of what it clearly sees as the winning formula of its rule – it’s respectable, i.e. most of all, effective – so that the classic accusation of “fascist barbarism” is not so humane any more. It is nothing but hypocrisy, insofar as its criteria for the relevant – “barbaric” – measures is whether they contributed to the intended national success, and merely goes through the motions of the objectivity that the “incomprehensible” requires in order to confirm that suspicion. The “crime” is only truly disgraced by its contribution to the downfall of its originator, the Third Reich. “Functionalists” and “intentionalists” are again in complete agreement when they see in the “moral catastrophe” a disastrous abandonment of a “realpolitik” measured by success: The Holocaust literally functions as the most striking proof of the ‘irrationality’ of an ideologically obsessed policy. Instead of being “realistic,” i.e. measuring success and assessing the chances of success, Hitler misjudged the world with his “doctrinaire view” and could not even distinguish between the external and internal enemy – which, as we know today, was not even an enemy. Because the two were “inextricably linked” in his program, he can be accused of an unforgivable “rigidity” in “implementing the core of his racial ideological program”; a “war in the East and a final solution” (Hillgruber I, p. 225) could not be achieved together. If what really makes the gassing of the Jews a real scandal is its connection with losing the war against the Russians, the terrible “tyranny” presents two sides: Tacitly, the purpose of the war against the Russians has become the “reality” that had to be taken care of, and the war against the Jews is the disturbing “consequence” of an “ideological illusory world”:

“Throughout his life and out of a mixture of instinct and vanity, Hitler shied away from confronting the ideological illusory world in which he lived with political and social reality . . . The anti-Semitic metaphor (!) spared him from thinking about the concrete consequences of his prophecy of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,’ especially as the campaign against the Soviet Union had crossed the Rubicon into a strategy of all or nothing. There was no longer any middle ground between Hitler’s concrete horizon of action, which was filled with military and arms details, and the unrealistic ideological construct which bore no relation to reality . . . Confronted with the real consequences of the extermination of the Jews, Hitler reacted no differently than his sub-leaders – he did not try to perceive or suppress them . . . Collective repression of inconvenient facts and criminal acts is part of the equipment of every political irrationalism.” (Mommsen, p. 261)

It is better not to worry that those who initiated the Holocaust might be horrified by its bloody inelegance, let alone speculate whether the “Final Solution” could have been abandoned in view of its unsavory practice: Anyone who bears responsibility as a leader in matters of national hygiene is charged with taking measures – which today seem ‘unpopular’ – so he does not need to “suppress” any “inconvenient facts” because they belong to his patriotic mission to fight for the salvation of his people.

A fine objection that historians raise here against fascism: When it comes down to “all or nothing” in war, the Nazis, with their “political irrationalism” toward the Jews, brought on themselves a secondary theater of war that was firstly superfluous and secondly weakened their military strength. So one differentiates the two goals of the fascist war program, the elimination of the internal enemy and the conquest of Lebensraum, into a completely normal side (= fighting the external enemy) and a completely absurd one (= fighting the internal enemy) and, on top of that, complains that the ideologically blinded Gröfaz could not even manage both program points “realistically,” i.e. according to a criteria of usefulness that promised success. Quite serenely, one knows all about the fundamental and unbridgeable distinction between a commendable, quite militant materialism of state violence, which always includes negative ideal images of the ‘real’ enemy – such as the Russians – on the one hand, and the idealism of National Socialist hostility toward Jews on the other, which is said to have no materially state-serving, seemingly ‘understandable’ basis at all. Because all the “innocents,” i.e. those who were useful for German politics – even decorated World War I participants – were turned into completely superfluous piles of corpses. Instead of having been put to much more plausible use as cannon fodder on the battlefield:

“People were murdered here who – regardless of whether they represented a political factor at all – were considered inferior . . . Mass murder was the National Socialist theory of biological materialism put into practice with uncanny consistency.” (Erdmann, p. 110f.)

Only the fatal connection between the gassing of the Jews and the fight against the Soviet Union proves the true extent of the alleged madness of this policy, and the moral rigor that it otherwise likes to exhibit in view of the extensively illustrated atrocities is completely reduced to a “realistic” idealism about how the Third Reich or the Second World War could have turned out better. The fact that the “Final Solution” hindered the final victory is also the most compelling argument against it, which hardly any “analysis,” whether “functionalist” or “intentionalist,” forgets:

“Hitler was incapable of setting priorities in this respect, and this inability was repeatedly expressed in his actions.” (Jäckel II, p. 91)

“It cannot be denied that during the summer campaign of 1942, all forces and all means of transportation should have been deployed toward Stalingrad for this strategically decisive objective. Nevertheless, Jews were transported by rail from all over Western and Central Europe to the extermination camps in Poland.” (Hillgruber I, p. 239)

“The fact that the policy of the ‘final solution’ tied up considerable material resources, including indispensable transportation, and so severely limited the urgently needed labor potential, would have made it obvious to modify the deportation and extermination practice. When occasionally confronted with this problem, Hitler usually reacted evasively.” (Mommsen, p. 261)

If you want to win a war, you have to do everything you can to win it and not get bogged down. If you haven’t won it, you haven’t done enough to win and you’ve gotten bogged down. Very clever, and hard to refute.

And even the Marburg School, which once suggested with its “scapegoat theory” that anti-Semitism was a particularly sophisticated form of Nazi ideology that diverted the actually anti-capitalist aspirations of the (good) German people away from the capitalist state and into state-conforming channels, participates in the imaginative sorting of fascist rule into justified and unjustified violence and, in the sheer annihilation of human beings, can only identify “fascist anti-Semitism’s irrational independence from the main purposes of its domestic and foreign policy” (Kühnl, p. 211):

“In explaining the mass murder, I see no way of getting around the thesis of a partial independence of fascist ideology and state power from both the profit interests of monopoly capital and the interests of the system in securing power.” (Kühnl, p. 211)

This too is quite indisputable: if one abstracts the fascist content from the “main purposes” of fascist “domestic and foreign policy,” some of the political measures of fascism do not fit the image of “domestic and foreign policy” as we know it, and one sees absolutely “no way of getting around” fitting it in with the same. And already it is “irrational” and quite “independent.” However, the more historical theory twists the Holocaust into “Hitler’s world view” or into the consequence of a “systemic compulsion” that can in turn be attributed to him, the more the question arises as to how such nonsense could be made into a binding national task with the knowledge and participation of an entire people. For science, this is first and foremost a chance to take a detailed look at

The “incomprehensibility” . . .

of these events, in order to secure this ideology once again with the demonstrative statement that, even with the best will in the world, no political reason for it can be imagined. In this way, the various “explanatory approaches” work their way to a shared judgment that the Holocaust was ultimately “incomprehensible” because “innocent people” were “barbarically” destroyed so “senselessly”:

“The paralyzing horror and moral indignation that everyone who takes a closer look at the history of this most abysmal of crimes must have feel . . .” (Jäckel II, p. 17)

“For the historian who seeks to understand the mass extermination of the Jews, the absolutely unique character of this catastrophe is the most difficult obstacle. It is not merely a question of time and historical perspective. I doubt that in a thousand years we will understand Hitler, Auschwitz, Madjanek and Treblinka any better than we do today.” (Deutscher, p. 163)

“What we do not understand is the almost abrupt dissolution of Germany’s political, institutional and legal structures, as well as the capitulation of moral forces.” (Friedländer, p. 49)

The extermination of the Jews appears “incomprehensible” to a civically trained mind in that “innocent people” – in other words: not foreign enemies – that is, good Germans or defenseless women and children – were murdered “senselessly” – in other words: without any kind of political advantage being discernible. The “shocked” insistence on the immense moral uniqueness of this ‘civil war’ without a political opponent, let alone an armed enemy, thrives on a deep sympathy with the use of state violence both internally and externally provided that the opponent it is intended to strike fits into the state’s image of the enemy. The same goes for the shudder shown at the industrialized machinery of extermination, in which one sees a unique cruelty that one does not want to notice in the equally systematic extermination of the French or Russians – because that was war and quite official. The “unbelievable” nature of this “cruelty” is reduced to the fact that it is so difficult to associate proper motives with it, and this alone constitutes the complete “incomprehensibility” on which so much emphasis is placed in this matter – in clear contrast to other major acts of National Socialist rule.

. . . made comprehensible . . .

And yet: how could this “moral catastrophe,” this “qualitative shift in politics into blatant crime” (Hillgruber I, p. 240) have come about? Once the terrain has been prepared and fascism has been defined as a deviation from the path of state virtue, historical expertise becomes certain and makes quite a lot that is “incomprehensible” comprehensible. Following the historical logic of explanation, according to which nothing is to be understood in itself, because one thing always results from another thing and the reason for something is always to be understood in its historical antecedents, it finds what it is looking for in the latter: Reasoning from deeds back to the historical framework conditions suitable for them, it discovers that the times were not quite morally stable; errors and confusion were in the air at the time, so to speak, and that made a lot “possible”:

“The moral catastrophe . . . was intellectually prepared: The detachment – made possible by a loss of religious and moral substance – of traditional values such as obedience, fulfillment of duties, willingness to sacrifice and loyalty from a larger context of values allowed National Socialism to take the forces of the ‘movement’ and political landsknechtism, which were ready to break with tradition, directly into its service.” (Hillgruber I, p. 242)

The historian is asking a little much of the ideals of civic duty, ranging from obedience to loyalty, which are equally popular with fascists and democrats alike because each of these forms of rule is equally happy to make use of them: of all things, that which formulates the absolute servitude of the subjects, their system-independent and universal usefulness as an unquestionable value, should protect them from “abuse”! And where this begins and “sensible” use ends is decided by, of all things, the presence of the fear of God and the morally primordial substance in which soldierly virtues would like to be embedded if the historian of its time wants to give his blessings!

In this case he doesn’t like this, so that his view of the historical continuum – from before to after and because before, therefore after – takes the form of a judgment about fascism: It was a “break with tradition,” that is, different from before . . .

His colleague Mommsen may ultimately also not be able to make heads or tails of the supposedly “unimaginable,” whereby he steps up Hillgruber’s mere “possibility” and says “conditioned”:

“The overall political-psychological structure that conditioned this is the real problem of the historical explanation of National Socialism.” (Mommsen, p. 250)

However, he does not gain much with this because, firstly, a condition only says what is not possible without it, but is therefore not yet actual with it, and secondly, the historian has only expressed his idea that fascism was subject to conditions with his drivel about the “overall structure.” This is why his search for historical motifs ends up with the “manipulative deformation of public and private morality” (Mommsen, p. 281), with “time” and the “human beings” conditioned by it.

. . . and declared to be necessary: The historical place of the Holocaust

is Hillgruber’s answer to this “problem,” which is said to have been made possible by the coincidental “constellation of the year 1941.” If one then adds the condition of a fanatically anti-Semitic leader, “constellations” became events and made the Holocaust quite inevitable:

“A great deal points to the peak of Hitler’s illusions of victory in July 1941, when a situation seemed to have arisen that offered a seemingly unique opportunity to realize long cherished intentions.” (Hillgruber II, p. 94)

By dissolving the decisive political will in Greater Germany for the “Final Solution” into a subjectless constellation of circumstances, the state purpose of genocide – no subject other than a state can pursue such an ambitious purpose! – is presented as the apolitical private delusion of an individual named Hitler, about whose “overall responsibility for the event there can’t be the slightest doubt” (Hillgruber II, p. 96), while the German state with its apparatus of violence is left as a morally clean organization, which in any case can not be blamed for the “Final Solution” with regard to its political program.

“The Final Solution”: a unique or comparable stain?

However, the small birth defect of today’s otherwise brilliant republic, which was born via a morally untenable legal predecessor which made German policy from German soil, has not been erased. And that has given German historians food for thought. Not that they have become confused about their interpretations of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as a “question of human guilt” and moral responsibility; they have worried about whether their eternal tossing around of the “Final Solution” as a stain on German national history is the right way to familiarize today’s nationalists with the latter in an appropriate manner. And because they are academics, they have also turned the rather simple problem of the best way to provide German citizens with a beautiful German nationalism – along with an equally beautiful historical tradition – into a dispute about the correct interpretation of history. The variants of the same were first discussed in the famous so-called “Historikerstreit,” which revolved around the question of which rules for interpreting German history should be adopted as universally valid: should one say of the “Final Solution” that there were also other genocides – which should make the “German crime” seem a little less bad – or is it better to convince the Germans of the blessings of their current political rule with the uniqueness of this national scandal?

While conservative whitewashers point to the “existence” of “genocide yesterday in Vietnam and today in Afghanistan” (Nolte) in order to emphasize “common aspects of the National Socialist murder of Jews with the kulak exterminations in the Soviet Union and the mass exterminations of the Pol Pot regime” (Schulze), ‘critically’ inclined historians want to preserve the uniqueness of the concentration camps as civic illustrative material. Such questions about the one/two/threefold nature of fascist “atrocities” can no longer be confused with inquiries into the intentions that these acts served. Instead of being about fascism, the question about uniqueness only provides information about the agitational preferences of the questioners: they condemn the acts in question – and at the same time ask themselves how much they should condemn them in order to make them useful for a modern national historic image as part of the “national identity.” The answers are fitting:

“The unreserved opening of the FRG to the political culture of the West is the great intellectual achievement of our post-war period. . . . Unfortunately, a commitment to universalist constitutional principles anchored in conviction could only develop in the cultural nation of the Germans after – and through – Auschwitz. Whoever wants to drive away the shame of this fact with a phrase like ‘guilt obsession,’ whoever wants to call the Germans back to a conventional form of their national identity, destroys the only reliable basis of our attachment to the West.” (Habermas)

The shame cultivated here by Habermas – on behalf of the successor state – is a single nationalistic exaltation of the fact that today’s German state has the noblest purposes of all. This can be seen, firstly, in the fact that evil institutions such as Auschwitz are completely alien to it. Secondly, in the unshakeable incorporation of the FRG into the Western cultural treasure called NATO, for which, thirdly, Auschwitz was the necessary prerequisite. The latter is the extremely “critical” way of expressing the fact that democracy (= “the West”) and fascism are worlds apart, while Auschwitz and the “East” probably have something like an elective affinity...

By contrast, the interpretation of the Holocaust as comparable to other genocides emphasizes the same thing in a different way: the moral demarcation from “Auschwitz” is there, only with the additional objection that one does not therefore have to be constantly slandered – with the kindergarten argument: “I know someone who did something just as bad.” With the stupid remark: “Not just the Nazis . . .” the historical relativization of “guilt” for the purpose of recasting German history with a relatively normal past for a state has already been completed.

On the basis of the national-moral ends of the “question of guilt,” however, the freedom of interpretation only comes into its own when it moves on to the reconstruction of contexts which – seen in the broader historical context, of course – either no longer point to any culprits at all or to those who are important today. Firstly, the evil in man:

“The fact of the direct or indirect involvement of so many people within the organizations, authorities and departments that kept the murder going and also acceptance of at least darkly suspected gruesome events by the mass of the population, however, point beyond the historical uniqueness of the incident. The obvious ease with which, under the civilizing conditions of the twentieth century, people could be persuaded to kill other people almost indifferently . . . is the most disturbing aspect, and the high proportion of academics is the most shocking. . . . These are dimensions that go into the anthropological, the social-psychological and the individual-psychological.” (Hillgruber II, p. 98 f.)

That makes sense: If German fascists seek out internal enemies and instruct their wretched band of citizens to exterminate them, it must have been the anthropos in all of us . . .

Or was it – secondly – more the good in man? For in principle he has that in abundance too:

“But the enthusiasm, the idealism, the willingness to make sacrifices, the ambition and the sporting joy with which many courageous people obliviously risked their lives for their people, as they thought, and for the Führer (as they did not always think, but for whose criminal plans they did) – that too can hardly be condemned. Some things may have been stupid, many things youthful and many not carefully considered – but is such a thing, in itself, somehow reprehensible?” (Meier)

But never, ever! What do we want to criticize about a people who were the perfect maneuverable mass of their authorities?! After all, that’s human nature: one person calls the shots and the others go along with it, even with enthusiasm! Anyone who considers his ideal of a servile mentality to be a piece of nature that merely does justice to human beings – at least to those who are born to obey – ends up making a somewhat indecent case in claiming this mentality for the broad realm of the human-all-too-human – and from this then “justifying” the fascist “uniqueness”: Humanly quite understandable . . .

Blame the Russians for the Holocaust?

It is Nolte’s discovery that the moral question of guilt for the “extermination of the Jews” can continue to be obsessed over in the German sense, if only the right perspective is provided and the moral force of the “crime” nails the true culprits. This does not mean the perpetrators in the sense of criminal law, but the ‘root of all evil,’ which has been known for some time:

“Nevertheless, the following question must appear to be permissible, indeed it’s unavoidable: Did the National Socialists perhaps only carry out an ‘Asiatic’ deed because they regarded themselves as potential or actual victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed? Wasn’t the GULAG archipelago more primordial than Auschwitz? Wasn’t the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual precedent of the ‘racial murder’ of the National Socialists?” (Nolte)

The strategic considerations that were made by the Nazis to protect themselves with a kind of preventive genocide against a similar one must of course remain Nolte’s secret if he considers “a causal nexus to be probable.” The main thing is that the unbridled accusations hit the right target, and in the last instance that is always communism because it is evil. His logic of a ‘logical and factual precedent’ strictly obeys the guild’s rules of thought: insofar as the chains of possible historical conditions can in principle never be completed – every circumstance introduced as a condition has another one that is temporally prior and can therefore itself be regarded as historically conditioned – this theoretical nonsense only makes sense as intended if the regression is not driven ad infinitum and a suitable “factual precedent” interrupts the logical circle. Otherwise he might have gone on to the genocide of our American friends against the Indians! At the point that suits him, the historian shouts ‘Eureka’: with the ‘cause’ he finds the extermination of the Jews understandable. With the very racist but historically scholarly phrase about Hitler’s “Asiatic deed,” Nolte selects the Soviet Union as a moral monstrosity that – just as the tragic politician Hitler is said to have done completely unhistorically – not only committed crimes, but is a crime.

A closing word from the Federal President

“Auschwitz remains singular. It was done in the name of Germany by Germans. The truth is incontrovertible. And it will not be forgotten.”

The Federal President is more comfortable with this version of national morality. He has admittedly made the historians’ guild look foolish by intervening in a raging methodological dispute and deciding it without a single argument, but with the moral authority of his office. But he didn’t mean any offense at all. He knows what he wants from a pluralistic historical science. They should carry on as before:

“Everyone will pursue their own research. There will often be differences. We should allow each other that.” Besides, nothing against a little fantasy: “Historical references and comparisons have their place in science.”

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Bibliography

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I. Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays

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