Abstract
History tries to explain what happened, not why what might have happened did not. So we need not infer from this quotation that one has somehow to explain why Germany and not France became the primary perpetrator of the Holocaust. The perpetrators were Germans and their state mobilized the resources and mounted the facilities that killed the Jews of Europe. But the German genocide embodied central tendencies in Western civilization; the attitudes and assumptions that made it possible existed all over Europe, North America and other parts of the civilized world; the processes by which the Final Solution was implemented were not peculiar to Germany but were the common property of the West.
[I]f people had been told in 1914 that within one generation most of the Jews of Europe would be murdered, their answer would most certainly have been: the French are capable of any crime.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
George L. Mosse, addressing a conference in New York in 1975, as quoted in Yehuda Bauer, ‘Trends in Holocaust Research’, Yad Vashem Studies XII (1977), 13 f.
‘Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths - none of these made Hitler murder the Jews.’ Milton Himmelfarb, ‘No Hitler, No Holocaust’, Commentary 77 (March 1984), 37.
Shulamit Volkov, ‘The Written Word and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism’, in Francois Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions(New York: Schocken Books, 1989 ), 33–53
Shulamit Volkov, ‘Antisemitism as a Cultural Code’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1978), 25–46.
Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 199 f.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), emphasizes the political function of antisemitism rather than its ideology.
See Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society. Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution. A History of European Racism ( New York: Harper, 1978 ), 168.
George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich ( New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964 ), 299.
Eva G. Reichmann, Hostages of Civilisation (London: Gollancz, 1950), argued that until World War I relations between Jews and gentiles in Germany had been improving steadily.
David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution ( London: Blackwell, 1992 ), 153–6.
John Weiss, Ideology of Death. Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 199, 389, 287.
Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996), 77, 85. Bankier, op. cit. 155 also believes that there was a consensus on the need to rid Germany of its Jews, but not necessarily in the nineteenth century.
So began what until recently was the most widely read work on the Holocaust, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), xxxv.
On the ‘intentionalist’ and ‘functionalist’ debates see Christopher Browning, Fateful Months (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 8–20
Christopher Browning, ‘Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered’, in The Path to Genocide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Urbana, Illinois: University of Indiana Press, 1970.
Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981 ), 64.
Detlev J.K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) 222 ff; 258–62.
Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988 ), 126, 201, 203.
Stefan Korbonski, The Jews and the Poles in World War II (Hippocrene, 1989)
Richard C. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (The University Press of Kentucky, 1985). In fact, the proportion of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership was significantly lower than in the populations from which that leadership was drawn. Weiss, Ideology of Death 214.
A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961).
Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews. The Genesis of the Holocaust ( London: Edward Arnold, 1994 ), 51.
Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship ( New York: Praeger, 1970 ), 365–9
Michael H. Kater, ‘Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany’ Yad Vashem Studies XVI (1984).
See Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
Yehuda Bauer, History of the Holocaust ( New York: Franklin Watts, 1982 ), 206.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews ( Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967 ), 262.
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany 1933–1945 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ).
Ingo Mueller, Hitler’s Justice. The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 14 f.
Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors ( New York: Basic Books, 1986 ).
On the medicalization of the ‘Jewish Question’, see Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 177–9.
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene. Medicine Under the Nazis ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 ), 194–8.
Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995 ), 151.
Tom Segev, Soldiers of Evil. The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987 ), 207.
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), describes the development of the scientific study of heredity and its connection with the eugenics movement, race prejudice, and antisemitism.
Charles G. Roland, Courage Under Siege. Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 ).
See Claudia Koonz, ‘Genocide and Eugenics: The Language of Power’, in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies ( Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991 ).
Allan A. Ryan, Jr, Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America ( San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984 ).
Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness. An Examination of Conscience (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 349 ff.
Rudolf Hoess, Cotnmandant of Auschwitz. The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess (London: Pan Books, 1961), 66 f., 86, 28 f., 38.
Ibid. 199, 201, 144, 170 f.; Martin Broszat, introduction to the revised German edition of Hoess’s autobiography, Kommandant in Auschwitz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), 19.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 29 f., 33
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 104 f.
Yahil, op. cit. 104. Shiraz Dossa, ‘Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: The Public, the Private, and Evil’, Review of Politics 46, 2 (April, 1984), 163–82, defends Arendt against the charges that arose in the aftermath of her book.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Lionel B. Steiman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Steiman, L.B. (1998). Nazi Germany: The Final Solution. In: Paths to Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40362-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37133-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)