HOLOCAUST: THE NAZI PERSECUTION AND MURDER OF THE JEWS
By Peter Longerich
Oxford University Press, $34.95, 608 pages
TRAVELS IN THE REICH, 1933-45: FOREIGN AUTHORS REPORT FROM GERMANY
By Oliver Lubrich, Kenneth J. Northcott, Sonia Wichmann and Krouk Dean
University of Chicago Press, $20.50, 336 pages
THE LIBERATORS: AMERICA’S WITNESSES TO THE HOLOCAUST
By Michael Hirsh
Bantam Books, $27, 356 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES
To grapple with the history of the Holocaust is to confront a vexing question of what parts of it must have been the most unimaginably horrible. These three books provide three unique points of view, none of them all-encompassing. But each offers a new window through which to glimpse in sharper relief an atrocity that is, sadly, becoming flattened with the passage of time.
The most compelling answer is provided by University of London historian Peter Longerich in a newly published translation of his 1998 book in German, “Politics of Destruction.” Mr. Longerich sifted through the 1930s archives of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, which after being secreted in Moscow at the end of the war finally were released to the public in the 1990s.
The answer that emerges from Mr. Longerich’s research is that the randomness of the Nazis’ policy of mass extermination meant that even at its most ruthlessly efficient, there still were Jews throughout Europe who till the end of the war clung to the awful hope that the swing of the scythe might miss them yet another time.
While he makes clear that the destruction of the Jewish population of Germany was a central theme of Nazi ideology and government policy from the earliest days, such a policy still had to fit into the complicated net of other policies in foreign affairs, economics, domestic politics and, of course, the waging of a war policy. Often - not often enough - compromises, delays and exceptions caused the killing machine to sputter and miss its targets.
What is important about this insight is that it leads Mr. Longerich to evidence that refutes the excuse that the broader Nazi program of Jewish oppression - here called Judenpolitik - did not depend on the broad support of the German populace but was the isolated work of a few mad zealots.
“Judenpolitik was subject to sudden shifts; it developed contradictorily, within a complex series of linkages and without any form of precedent. It could not be implemented by people who were merely following orders but required active protagonists who could operate on their own initiative and understand intuitively what the leadership required of them. … This system could only function if the most important aspects of Judenpolitik commanded a consensus among those involved with it.”
But even with that consensus among the German people, the simple policy decision for extermination that was set in 1942 did not mean that all Jews throughout all of occupied Europe were doomed to the same fate. As he notes, “Large Jewish communities could be saved (as they were in France, Italy, Denmark, Old Romania, and Bulgaria) or they were lost (as in Hungary and Greece). In each instance, “a chain of decisions” had to be taken by the implementers well after the “final solution” had been set.
If it was hard for those most directly threatened by the Nazi genocide to calculate their own risk, it is small wonder that casual observers might be excused for not comprehending the awful prospect of Hitler’s rise to power and a Germany caught up in xenophobic frenzy.
Oliver Lubrich, a Berlin Free University professor, has done us all a favor by pulling together a collection of diary entries, memoirs and published articles by an array of well-known figures who passed through Germany from the earliest days of Hitler’s ascendency to the final moments of the war’s destruction of that nation.
Some visitors saw Hitler and the Nazis for what they were right away; among them writers Christopher Isherwood, Jean Genet and journalist William L. Shirer. Others, like Thomas Wolfe, started off by being impressed with the apparent German economic miracle but eventually changed their minds. The black American philosopher W.E.B. Dubois saw the persecution of German Jews but tempered his witness because he felt socially accepted among German intellectuals to a degree he could never aspire to in the United States.
And then there were the fools. Most notably, Mr. Lubrich includes commentary from the notorious Martha Dodd, a flighty, self-centered ignoramus who arrived in Berlin in 1933 with her father, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador. She reveled in an attempt to fix her up romantically with Der Fuhrer himself, but in later years, she about-faced and became an active Soviet intelligence agent and ended her days in exile behind the Iron Curtain.
Some of the entries border on the comic. Take young John F. Kennedy, who with a buddy spent the summer of 1937 on an educational grand tour that consisted mainly of picking up prostitutes along the way and making such observations as, “All the (German) towns are very attractive, showing that the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins. The Germans really are too good - it makes people gang against them for protection.” Talk about profiles in courage.
Documentary filmmaker Michael Hirsh has produced a noteworthy reporting effort by tracking down and interviewing more than 150 U.S. veterans of World War II who could bear witness to being the first Americans through the gates of Nazi concentration camps. In addition to providing firsthand accounts of the horrors they witnessed, “The Liberators” also reveals the psychological burden those witnesses carried - often in secret - all the rest of their days. Anyone who has done military service will understand the subtext of pain and sorrow that runs through this fine account.
James Srodes is a Washington journalist and author. His e-mail address is: srodesnews@msn.com
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