PART II

DOGMA AND SKEPTICISM

In the previous installment I discussed how an ancient religious term was given new meaning by Elie Wiesel and his reasons for doing so. We now have to confront the question how the “Final Solution” of the Nazis Jewish problem, which had originally been treated within the context of other German war crimes committed during WWII, achieved such a unique stature that Norman Finkelstein has felt himself compelled to write a book which he called, The Holocaust Industry.  This installment will explore the possible reasons for the more than two decades delay before the Holocaust came to be regarded as a unique event in human history, its subsequent promotion as such, and the resistance it has encountered.

In May of 1945 some of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, like Victor Frankl, went back to their home towns and attempted to restart their lives which had been so brutally interrupted and in part destroyed by the loss of their family members. But since most of them did not come from central or Western Europe and the Soviet Union was now in charge of their homelands an exchange of one tyranny from which they had miraculously just escaped to another one was not a desirable option. They therefore became “DPs” (displaced persons) who continued to be housed in camps until countries of permanent residence could be found. Peter Novick, whose scholarly treatise The Holocaust in American Life, which ought to be read by everyone who wants to be educated on this topic, explains this aspect,

“In the immediate aftermath of V-E Day there were more than ten million displaced persons in Germany and Austria, of whom only a tiny fraction were Jewish camp survivors. Before the end of 1945 the great majority had been repatriated, but there remained nearly two million DPs. They included former POWs and forced laborers who preferred not to return to their homes in the East, Volksdeutsch [sic; e missing], who had been expelled from Eastern Europe, Baltic and Ukrainian German auxiliaries and their families, and various others who, for whatever reason, preferred a precarious life in the DP camps of Germany to whatever awaited them at home.

While the number of Gentile DPs decreased rapidly after the end of the war, the number of Jewish DPS increased over the next year and a half, though they remained a fraction of the overall total. In the first few months after liberation, almost all Jewish camp survivors from Western Europe, as well as many from the East, returned to their countries of origin. There were perhaps no more than 50,000 Jewish DPs in Germany in late 1945. But over the next year their ranks swelled as Jews returning to Poland confronted not just the total devastation of their communities but murderous Polish pogroms. The largest single addition to the ranks of Jewish DPs were those Polish Jews who had found refuge in the Soviet Union during the war, and who, after a brief stopover in the Jewish graveyard that was postwar Poland, usually continued their journey westward. . . . By the end of 1946 the number of Jewish DPs (mostly in Germany, smaller numbers in Austria and Italy) was estimated at about 250,000 [footnote 14 provides a reference]. Perhaps a fifth of these were survivors of the camps, but all were in one or another sense survivors of the Holocaust.”

These aspects must be taken into account when we consider the totality of the massive tragedy that had befallen Europe as a result of WWII. Lives had to be rebuilt from scratch, which also included those of the people of Germany and Austria. Refugees had to be absorbed, cities rebuilt brick by brick, currencies were devalued and reparations had to be paid. Having personally lived through the aftermath of the war I know that life was tough. But the emphasis was directed towards the future rather than ruminating over the past. This was a luxury one could indulge in when conditions had achieved a degree of normality again

The Holocaust phenomenon, as we now know it, started in America and initially there were widely differing opinions within the Jewish community as to how the memories of the survivors should be treated. Up to the 1960s America had other priorities, and Jewish problems were not high on the list. American Jews did not press the issue because they still felt insecure and were concerned about a possible anti-Semitic backlash if they became too vociferous. Israeli Jews were engaged in wars with their neighbors and in addition fostered a self-concept that differed considerably from that of their American relatives. While the key word for Americans was “victimhood,” “heroic resistance” was promoted in Israel. The memory of the Final Solution was, therefore, treated differently in the two countries. This is also exemplified by the full title of Israel’s Yad Vashem. As Novick points out it is called “Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, and the full name of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoa, is “Day of the Holocaust and Heroism.” Thus, the Holocaust and Israel are inextricably entwined, as had been mentioned in the previous installment and in essence deal with the fundamental question of Jewish self-identification.

When attempts were made to publish Holocaust data during the late 1940s and up to the 1960s authors had difficulties doing so. Even Raul Hilberg, whose The Destruction of the European Jews has become the standard for scholarly research, had to go begging for sponsors to subsidize the publication of what really was his PhD thesis. In his latest book, The Politics of Memory, he pointed out that he had thought that the costs could be split between the Columbia University Press and Yad Vashem but the Israeli authorities refused to do so. This might strike one as strange but had its roots in the previously mentioned Jewish identity problem. Hilberg, the scholar, had failed to take this overarching phenomenon into account. I shall discuss this in more detail in Part III, which will deal with the antecedents and execution of the attempted Final Solution from the German point of view. It will suffice for now to point out the difference in Jewish interests between Zionists and those who favored assimilation. The former needed Jewish immigration into Palestine, which would be hastened, the assumption was, if anti-Jewish sentiments became more virulent in Diaspora countries, while the latter wanted to live in as much peace as possible wherever they resided. Stirring up trouble unnecessarily, by bringing up old grievances including the Final Solution was not their idea of peace and prosperity.

Hilberg, who had no political ax to grind and was only interested in establishing the full truth of how the destruction of European Jewry had come about, was caught between these two competing and actually mutually exclusive ideologies. He committed furthermore a cardinal sin in the eyes of some of the leading functionaries in the Jewish community. The dictum is that: Jews should write about Jews in a manner that is good for Jews. As such an open unbiased approach, which shows that Jews had actually not only, by and large, not resisted the onslaught which befell them but had indirectly contributed to its success by following the advice they had received from their community leaders - Judenräte - could neither be condoned in Israel where heroism was called for, nor in America where it might sully the picture of the pure victim.

By 1961 Hilberg had finally found a publisher as well as the needed money and his dissertation appeared as a three volume document. The timing was fortuitous because Adolf Eichmann, who had been portrayed as a vicious sadistic monster responsible for the death of 6 million Jews, had just been abducted from Argentina and brought to trial in Jerusalem. As Novick points out it is interesting to note that the reaction among American Jews to this event was also far from unanimous because some law abiding Jewish citizens felt that to abduct somebody from foreign soil and then try him by the enemy was not exactly fair play. It was, furthermore, argued that since he had not committed any crimes within or against the State of Israel he should be tried in Europe where they had actually taken place. With other words the legitimacy of Jerusalem, to act not only in a high-handed manner but also to speak for all Jews of the world was questioned.

The Eichmann trial can be regarded as the first watershed in the American attitude towards the Final Solution. It received wide attention and was extensively written up in a series of articles in The New Yorker by Hannah Ahrendt, who subsequently published the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Banality of Evil.” Her reports and the book created a furor in high placed Jewish circles and she was denounced as a “Self-hating Jewess.” The reason was that she did not portray the captured Eichmann as an arrogant, vicious, sadistic, anti-Semitic murderer but as a pathetic bureaucrat who under ordinary circumstances might never have come to anyone’s attention. There was an additional fact. Her reports made clear that the Nazis had been far less efficient than they had been portrayed, and that their successes depended on the cooperation of the conquered countries. This news was not particularly welcome although it had been Hilberg’s thesis all along. On the other hand, who reads a three volume thesis which has the facts but lacks the hate? Ahrendt later admitted that she had freely used Hilberg’s data for her own book, although the latter disagreed with her characterization of Eichmann.

Leaving these disputes aside one aspect struck me in her book and that was the fate of the Jews of France versus those of Romania and other nations under German occupation. When Europe was “combed” from West to East in search of Jews, the French had no problem with giving their refugee Jews, who had come to France prior to 1940 and were as such stateless, back to Hitler, via Eichmann. But when Eichmann in his Pflichtgefűhl (sense of duty) subsequently also wanted French citizens of the Jewish religion they drew the line and simply refused to go along. According to Ahrendt’s book more than 300,000 Jews resided in France at the outbreak of the war. This number was subsequently augmented somewhat by Jewish refugees from Holland and Belgium. In the spring of 1940, there were about 100.000 stateless Jews who could theoretically have been deported. But even this did not work because the Germans made a mistake after the deportation of 27,000 of these unfortunate people. For the sake of efficiency, because it was race that counted rather than citizenship, they began to lump stateless Jews with French citizens in the transports. The French didn’t see it that way and refused further cooperation altogether. In this way about 250,000 Jews survived the war in France.

These numbers, just as most others dealing with the Final Solution are in dispute. Gerald Reitlinger’s book, The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, which was first published in the UK in 1953, listed a total of 500,000 Jews in conquered France of whom 57,000 were deported to Auschwitz. But these differences are not important. What matters is that, as far as France and some other European countries were concerned, even the attempt towards the Final Solution was far from final. The example also showed that when the Nazis saw that they were frustrated in their endeavors in one country they turned to others where there was less resistance to their efforts of gaining free labor and wealth. As Hitler said in one of his Tischgespraeche, “We’ll deal with the [remaining] Jews after the war.”

What the Eichmann trial did accomplish was that it brought more eye witness testimony of the atrocities that had occurred in the camps, back into memory. Yet the time still was not right for the Holocaust to achieve the prominence it has in today’s America. It needed two more wars in Israel and the beginning of the “counter-culture” here. The successful 1967 war which led to the conquest of all of Palestine including the Sinai and East Jerusalem, temporarily erased the mental victim status Jews had fostered in the Diaspora. The Israeli victory raised the self-confidence of American Jews because they could now point to the accomplishments of their relatives. That this 1967 victory was a Pyrrhic one is not yet fully acknowledged. It presented the Israelis with Hitler’s problem. Now they had too many Arabs but even an attempt at a “Final Solution of the Arab Problem” is no longer possible. The current “unilateral disengagement” plan is in my opinion probably too little and too late.

While the 1967 war had an indirect positive effect on the self-identification of American Jews the influence of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights struggle and change in America’s culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s should also not be underestimated. Individual Jews, as well as Jewish organizations had supported the Civil Rights Movement, and especially the baby boom generation was no longer content to just sit back as their elders did. It is no secret that the intellectual leadership of the campus unrest during the Vietnam War and of the “counter-culture” rested to a fair extent in the hands of young Jews who rebelled against everything the establishment stood for. While these events paved the way for greater outward Jewish assertiveness, the Holocaust was still not an issue that would grip Gentile America.

The 1973 Yom Kippur war again brought a change in Jewish self-perception. The initial setback took Israelis by surprise. Although they soon recovered more territory than they had lost, the initial shock had left a distinct mark not only on the Israeli psyche. The aura of invulnerability that had been cherished after 1967 was now damaged and old fears of total annihilation were rekindled. Novick wrote,

“In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, American Jewish leaders were confronted with an agonizing problem, which was summed up by Leonard Fein, editor of the Jewish magazine Moment [September 1975]:

‘A complex fear has taken hold of us since October 1973. Its roots lie in our renewed awareness of Jewish vulnerability, now widely perceived as permanent, perhaps even ultimate. . . . The terrible isolation of Israel, the dramatic ascendance of the Arabs . . . Israel’s near total dependence on the United States – all these are aspects of our present gloom.’”

            The answer to this “gloom” was found, as Novick writes, by two top leaders of the Anti-Defamation League Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein and he quotes from their book,

“’For a long while after World War II, sympathy for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide . . .  helped to open doors long closed to Jews here and abroad. Certainly the State of Israel was one direct beneficiary of world empathy with the Jewish victims of Nazism.

In the postwar world . . . the time during which the non-Jewish world continued to view Jews as oppressed was incredibly short. Within twenty-five years after the photographs of the bestiality in the concentration camps shocked the world  . . . Jews had ceased being victims.’”

Forster and Epstein were not the only ones who had recognized the desirability of victimhood and the best avenue to achieve this status would be to resurrect the shameful atrocities of the Nazis attempted Final Solution. From these political considerations a new dogma was born. It might be formulated as:

Out of pure hate the Nazis’ efficient killing machine had brutally murdered six million Jews, in order to extinguish the Jewish people forever. Because of all pervasive anti-Semitism, Gentiles did little or nothing to prevent the crime in the first place and did not interfere with its execution subsequently. The Jewish people are again in mortal danger which can only be averted by keeping the guilt for the moral turpitude of the non-Jewish world constantly before their eyes and be ever vigilant against any stirring of anti-Semitic notions. 

A concentrated effort to this effect was launched with President Carter’s “Commission on the Holocaust,” which was discussed in Part I, as the first step. Not only did Holocaust Museums rise up in American cities but an avalanche of books, and to some extent movies, was loosened which fostered this interpretation and became the “Holocaust Industry.” As Finkelstein has documented this was highly profitable financially for authors, lawyers and Jewish organizations but hardly anything trickled down to the few real victims who were still alive.

But we live in a skeptical age and not everybody was willing to accept this dogma on its merits, especially when it was promoted with religious zeal and was turned from belief into fact which everybody had to subscribe to. The laws of physics, under which all of us live, state that every action leads to a reaction, and a revival of the Holocaust memory, decades after the events when most perpetrators and victims had already died, could not be an exception. Initially the number of 6 million who had perished was questioned. This was not totally unreasonable because it is not entirely clear how this number was arrived at. Most likely it comes from the Nuremberg trials which will be discussed in the next installment. But that initial exaggerations had occurred, especially in regard to how many people were killed in Auschwitz, was documented by Reitlinger in his previously mentioned book. In the chapter entitled, “The End of Auschwitz” Reitlinger wrote,

“The Red Army did not arrive till January 26^th. They found 2,819 invalids in the three camps [Auschwitz proper, Birkenau and Monowitz] whom they spared no pains to nurse back to health. In due course the Soviet State Commission arrived and on May 12^th the world was presented with its findings [footnote 29 refers to the Nuremberg document IMT VII, 127].

‘However, using rectified coefficients for the part-time employment of the crematorium ovens and for the periods they stood empty, the technical expert commission had ascertained that during the time that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers exterminated in this camp not less than four million citizens of the U.S.S.R., Poland, France, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and other countries.’

The world has grown mistrustful of ‘rectified coefficients’ and the figure of four millions has become ridiculous. Unfortunately Russian arithmetic has blurred the stark and inescapable fat that little less than a million human beings perished in Auschwitz, its gas chambers and its camps.”

Reitlinger, who cannot possibly be labeled as an anti-Semite, subsequently did his own calculations from available deportation transport documents and came up with 840,800. Nevertheless, the number 4 million was initially engraved in stone at Auschwitz. In 1995, after the fall of the communist regime in Poland, it was revised to the now “official” number of 1.5 million people of all countries and religions. That this is also not the final figure is apparent from various websites. But it is fruitless to enter into this controversy. It is not the numbers that count but the fact that people were brutally sacrificed in pursuit of a chimerical greater good of a nation.

While initially only the numbers of victims were questioned some people, for various reasons of their own, then began to challenge the means that were employed. They asserted that the gas chambers, in what has become known as the extermination camps, were used only to disinfect clothing rather than murder people. This became the basis for what is currently called “Holocaust denial.” It is now the most serious charge that can be leveled against anyone because it leads not only to loss of reputation and professional career, but also to criminal prosecutions in Germany and Austria. Germany has passed a specific law to that effect and in Austria the British author David Irving, is currently jailed in Vienna on the charge of spreading neo-Nazi ideology. Under § 3 of the Austrian Verbotsgesetz, which was passed on May 8, 1945 and reconfirmed in 1992, he received yesterday a 3 year prison sentence.

As mentioned in “Today’s Democracy in America” (January 2004) I have met David Irving on two occasions and although he holds some views that are clearly unconventional and irksome his current fate seems beyond necessity. His dilemma is, however, in part self-inflicted. He started out with writing biographies of important WWII figures, especially German Nazis, and came to the conclusion that the history of that period does not take the views of the vanquished into full account. As such he became an idol of some groups that harbor resentment for Germany’s defeat. He did nothing to dissuade them from some of the more outlandish opinions but endorsed some of them in a flippant, offhand manner. This included the statement that the Nazis had not carried out human gassing in the camps. He thereby engendered the wrath of Deborah Lipstadt who labeled him in her book, “Denying the Holocaust. The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. He became persona non grata in respectable society, his books began to vanish from bookstores and his income started to dry up. He then decided to fight back and sued Lipstadt as well as Penguin books for libel. While he might have won that law suit in a British Court he made a fundamental mistake by appearing as his own attorney. Lipstadt had several highly paid ones, who poured over every sentence the man had ever written, or reportedly said, to prove their point. Irving did not help himself by his offhand and arrogant behavior in court and especially by stating that there was no proof for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. At that point the Judge had heard enough and branded him officially as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. This led to complete financial ruin and he had to support himself by giving talks to small groups and selling his books from his van. Several countries, among them Austria, banned him from entry but he went anyway and was arrested in Styria on his way to Vienna in November of last year. The Austrian government really had no choice in the matter because had they let this “Holocaust denier” proceed the Jewish community would have been outraged and since the Austrians have already enough problems of this type they didn’t need another one. Why did Irving risk arrest? I believe that he knew full well what was going to happen to him but he sees himself as a spokesperson against the established views and was eager not only to rehabilitate himself but also for the glare of the spotlight that a trial would bring.

Dr. Lipstadt, to her credit, was not in favor of his being sentenced but stated that Irving should be allowed to go back home because there is no sense making a martyr out of him. I agree but there are some problems with her book, which is now part of the Holocaust legacy. Although she is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University her book is not written in the detached style of academia but in a more passionate and somewhat polemical one. She is not in favor of being questioned about details in regard to how the Final Solution was carried out and seems somewhat too ready to relegate all these questioners to the ranks of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. While there is no doubt that some of them fit this label others do not and painting everybody with the same brush is not helpful to her cause. She is also highly critical of those whom she regards as adversaries to her views but has a considerably less critical attitude towards what is currently regarded as the official history, written by the victors of WWII.

I do not intend to enter into Dr. Lipstadt’s belief system because that is personal, what I do want to discuss is the subtitle of her book with the key words, “Truth” and “Memory.” I shall stay with memory because it is the basis on which personal truth rests. Again I am indebted to Dr. Novick’s book that discussed this aspect and the work by Maurice Halbwachs on “Collective Memory” of which I had been unaware. I did not doubt Novick’s statements about Halbwachs’ fundamental ideas but since they are so important I wanted to be one hundred per cent sure which necessitated another trip to the Marriott Library for this book, and am happy to report that what Novick wrote is accurate. What makes Halbwachs especially relevant in the present context is that although his insights were published originally in the 1920s they are completely vindicated now. Halbwachs’ fundamental thesis, as explained in the Introduction by Lewis A. Coser to his translation of Halbwachs’ book On Collective Memory, states that “the past is a social construction mainly, if not wholly, shaped by the concerns of the present [emphasis added].”

As everybody knows individual memory is subjective and only partially reliable. In addition it gets steadily worse the greater the distance is from the original event which laid down the trace in our brain. In regard to the Holocaust there are very few people with personal memories left and we are now dealing with Halbwachs’ collective memory, which gets constantly reshaped for the needs of the moment. I believe that this is indeed the clue to understanding the Holocaust as it is presented today. Individual memories of extremely traumatic personal events, as well as hearsay have become conflated and now constitute “The Holocaust,” which is no longer open to question. But every concentration camp survivor saw only a small piece of the total event, just as soldiers remember only a minute fraction of what they experienced during a given war.  All the rest is subsequently collated from other sources and becomes the final memory which in turn undergoes constant change because the proteins that made up the engram and the neuronal connections that lead to its recovery are no longer the same.

As far as America is concerned the Holocaust has mainly become collective memory, because nearly all of the camp survivors are dead. A typical example for collective memory, that fits the current context, comes from the Halbwachs monograph and deals with Masada. For about two thousand years the siege of that fortress and the collective suicide of the defenders, instead of surrender to the Romans, was a non-event in Jewish history. It does not show up in the Talmud or other Jewish scripture. But in 1927 a young Lithuanian immigrant to Palestine, Yitzakh Lamdan, created a poem praising the heroic resistance and resilience of the Jewish people with Masada as the shining example. A visit to Masada is now a must for every tourist to Israel, just as a visit to Yad Vashem is. But what happened at Masada in 73 AD is reported only by Josephus, who did not have kind words about the morals of the Sicarii defenders, and he based his story exclusively on the reports of two women who had hid with five children in order to escape the massacre. Josephus is not always a reliable historian and we don’t even know whether or not he interviewed these women in person, had simply heard, or made up the story. This is not important; what matters is the usage that has been made of it for the purpose of creating an image that should befit the twentieth rather than the first century. The image has become fact!

As far as personal memory is concerned I was also so intrigued by Novick’s footnote in regard to the memory of survivors that I got the original article “Memory as History” (Richard Ketchum, American Heritage; Nov 91, Vol.42 Issue 7), from which he quoted. It deals with the personal memories of participants in the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill which ushered in the American Revolution. When the cornerstone for the Monument to commemorate the event in 1825 was laid, 40 ex-soldiers of the Revolutionary Army who claimed to have taken part in the battle were in attendance. Their recollections were collected in 3 volumes but when these were critically examined by a commission in 1842 it became evident that the contents were,

“’most extraordinary, many of the testimonies extravagant, boastful, inconsistent, and utterly untrue; mixtures of old men’s broken memories and fond imaginings with the love of the marvelous. Some of those who gave in affidavits about the battle could not have been in it, nor even in its neighborhood. They had gotten so used to telling the story for the wonderment of village listeners as grandfathers’ tales, and as petted representatives of ‘the spirit of ‘76,’ that they did not distinguish between what they had seen and done and what they had read, heard, or dreamed. The decision of the committee was that much of the contents of the volumes was wholly worthless for history, and some of it discreditable, as misleading and false.’”

Well, so much for Bunker Hill but how about the Holocaust. Novick relates that,

“A few years ago the director of Yad Vashem’s archive told a reporter that most of the twenty thousand testimonies it had collected were unreliable: ‘Many were never in the places where they claim to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on secondhand information given them by friends or passing strangers [footnote refers to a statement by Shmuel Krakowski quoted in Barbara Amouyal’s article. ‘Doubts over Evidence of Camp Survivors” in the Jerusalem Post of August 17, 1986]. Primo Levi one of the most renowned survivor-witnesses has described this phenomenon:

‘The greater part of the witnesses . . . have ever more blurred and stylized memories, often, unbeknownst to them, influenced by information gained from later readings or the stories of others . . . A memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype . . . crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense’ [footnote refers to Primo Levi’s book The Drowned and the Saved, published originally in Italy in 1986 and its English translation which was published in 1988; ellipsis are in the original].”

In summary it appears that the Holocaust, as currently portrayed, is no longer based entirely on history but has entered the field of collective memory and is deliberately used for specific purposes. As such, there should be room for skepticism, when expressed in a scholarly manner, and if further investigations are called for, they ought to be allowed to proceed by internationally recognized experts in their respective fields. Next week’s installment will conclude this series with reflections from the German side, some personal experiences with the Nazi power structure, and lessons to be learned.