The following is one of my current assignments for World War II History in Context. It's a short historiography of how historians have dealt with culpability for the Nazis since 1945.
Footnotes
To Impugn a People - A Historiography of the Crimes of the Nazi Regime
Foreword
After
originally being tasked to construct a historiographical overview of the
home-front in World War two, the author chose to concentrate this endeavor upon
the German home-front in general and in particular the level of understanding
or even culpability of the Deutsche Volk in the crimes of the Nazi regime. This
specificity however, came at a price as the author found the depth of scholarly
literature devoted to this particular subject to be rather shallow, recent, and
monolithic in interpretation. The author therefore chose to broaden the topic
to incorporate the historiography of the path to Naziism. The author believes
the average German played an integral role in this rise and has incorporated
the examined historians’ views of this subject to attempt to keep with the
specific theme of the assignment.
Introduction
In 1945, as the entire
world began to see the horrific photographs coming out of the Nazi
concentration camps following their liberation by the victorious Allied armies,
the instinctual response was a collective, guttural cry of “Why?” How could a
modern, civilized people perpetrate such horrific crimes? Who was responsible?
1945 marked a
significant turning point in how European historians viewed modern Europe. Instantly,
every historical study was seen through the lens of the Holocaust and the rise
of Nazism. The problem, however, was that the still palpable emotional reaction
to the horror heavily influenced historical study. To further complicate
matters, the descent of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe severely muddied
the waters of objectivity.
Immediate Post-War Schools
At the close of the
war, the first works published on the conflict, at least on the German side
were biographical accounts of various generals’ experiences in the war. Nearly
all blatantly falsified history in order to cover up personal tactical error or
simply omitted the less palatable incidents that would not come to light for
another fifty years. Von Manstein, for example, outright lied about his orders
in the Battle of Stalingrad to remove his culpability in that German disaster.[1] There was little serious scholarship from
German historians save the eminent, but aged Meincke who’s The German Catastrophe showed Hitler as a natural, but not
altogether unalterable consequence of the early 1930s.
The victorious allies
initially condemned the entirety of the German population, dramatically
demonstrated by the orders of the various military commanders following the
liberations of the concentration camps; in which they forced the local towns’
populations to tour the camps and help with the ‘clean up’. This conventional
wisdom, however, was tempered with a desire to rebuild, move on, and not repeat
the vengeful mistakes at Versailles, which were still accepted as a causus belli for this Second World War. With
this desire to move on while still punishing the guilty, the Nuremburg Trials
provided a catharsis for not only the Allies in measuring out justice to the
Nazis, but it provided a means of escape for the average German. By offering up
the tangible faces of the architects of the regime’s crimes, the trials had a
way of shifting the totality of responsibility upon the tried in the most
public of ways. The condemning and sentencing of the war criminals had, for
better or worse, appeased the guilty conscience of a guilty people. Certainly
this is not to say the average German was as culpable as the architects of the
Final Solution, but the trials served to provide scapegoats for the collective
whole.
The sub current of the
Cold War also severely affected the nascent scholarship of the question of the
culpability of the German people. To deal with the past in an open and honest
way was detrimental to the more important and at hand task of rebuilding the
present. In the face of Communist belligerence, the fledgling post-war West
Germany could ill afford to devote serious attention to dealing with unresolved
issues of unrepentant Nazis within their midst.[2]
Marxist historians
painted the rise of Nazism not as a peculiar trait of German history, but
through the all too familiar rose-colored lens of class conflict. Alfred
Sohn-Rethe indicted the fascist flavor of capitalism as responsible for the
crimes of the Nazi regime. The lust for profit of the German captains of
industry was enabled and empowered by the National Socialist government foreign
policy of organized theft and slave labor.[3] Liberal
historians meanwhile viewed the war and the crimes of the Nazi regime as solely
attributable to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party.
Some, like A. J. P.
Taylor and Lewis Namier saw the rise of the National Socialists as a natural
endpoint of modern German history. Taylor rejected the liberal’s easy dismissal
of Nazism to Hitler being a peculiar phenomenon of German history. He claimed
casting the preponderance of the blame upon Hitler appeased the victorious
Allies but more so, provided the German people a far too simple explanation. With
Hitler dead, “the blame for everything – the Second World War, the
concentration camps, the gas-chambers – could be loaded on to his uncomplaining
shoulders. With Hitler guilty, every other German could claim innocence.”[4] Dissatisfied
with this simplistic explanation, Taylor became one of the first revisionist
historians of the war, and a precursor of the Sonderweg school. Never completely absolving Hitler, nor the Nazi
party, Taylor did however, spread the blame for the war across all parties;
from the punitive measures of the Versailles treaty, to the enabling of the
British appeasement policy of the mid 1930s. Taylor, however, was quickly
largely discredited by contemporaries; not for his thesis necessarily, but for
his shoddy scholarship and discounting of key evidences supporting Hitler’s
primary culpability such as Mein Kampf
and the designs for Europe he himself had published.[5]
Nuanced Theories
With the benefit of nearly 15
years of hindsight, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most historians took on
a slightly more nuanced view of culpability. No longer content with a
simplistic explanation, historians saw the need to examine the role of
business, culture, and other German social institutions in war-time Germany,
significantly broadening the scope of inquiry from beyond the Nazi party in
general and Hitler in particular. Certainly the most familiar of the contemporary
histories published falling into this camp is William L. Shrier’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.[6]
As a foreign correspondent, Shrier covered the Nazi regime following their rise
to power in 1932 all the way up until the conquering of Western Europe in 1940.
Shrier explored all aspects of the rise of the Nazis to include uncompromising
looks at the complicity of business magnates with the Nazi regime. Shrier’s most
valuable contribution to history was his narrative, first-hand accounts of life
under the Nazi boot. Even though distasteful, one feels sympathy with the
German businessman, who, forced to comply with endless government interference
and out of necessity, finally submits to the Nazi program in order to make his
business profitable.
Der Sonderweg
Initially, these
nuanced looks were confined to non-German western historians, but following
Fritz Fischer’s 1960 groundbreaking work on the links between the First World
War and the Second, German historians took on the odious task of examining
their own history more closely. Out of this introspection arose the Sonderweg, or “Special Path” theory. Fischer
expanded upon Taylor’s work by extrapolating the thesis back to the First World
War.[7] This
Sonderweg period spurred German
historians to look back into the 19th Century to explore where in
the rise of the modern German state had the path to modernity diverged from the
one taken by France, Britain, and the United States.[8]
In 1980, David
Blackbourn and Geoff Eley deconstructed the Sonderweg
interpretation by questioning the classification of Germany’s path as
especially unique. They used several essays to demonstrate that England’s path
to modernity and France’s were just as unique and different as Germany’s. They
questioned what qualifies the United States’, French, and British experiences
as normal to measure against Germany’s.[9]
Historikerstreit
The Historikerstreit, or “Historian Debate” period took place against the
backdrop of a conservative Kohl government, the Reagan-led nuclear arms race,
and the benefit of forty years removal from the death camps. In the 1980s,
German historians were poised for a shift from the Fischer Sonderweg back towards more dissociative theories. The 1986 publication
of Ernst Nolte’s speech describing the Holocaust as a defense mechanism against
the barbarism of the Bolsheviks ignited a firestorm amongst German historians. Michael
Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber similarly painted parallels between the
totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet system of both the World War
II period and the contemporary Cold War.[10] Opposing
this view and still holding to the Sonderweg
School were Jürgen Habermas and Hans Mommsen among others, who accused Nolte
and others of minimizing the Nazi crimes. Both sides in the debate fell victim
to contemporary politics and polemics, significantly cheapening the impact and
marginalizing the valid points made in their respective arguments.
Goldhagen and the Evasive Versus Destructive Theories
Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust pushed the pendulum back toward the Sonderweg
school.[11]
Though it had great commercial success and seemed to open a door to an open and
honest debate on the subject, now unencumbered by the politics of East versus
West, Goldhagen fell very short in the eyes of contemporary historians. In
2002, Gellately rightly decried “monocausal” explanations for the sins of the
German people and severely criticizes Goldhagen’s description.[12]
Gellately argues that racial hatred for the Jews was a relative latecomer to
the Nazi effort to propagandize its people. He does not discount Hitler’s
hatred for the Jews, but claims the hatred was not one that was widely shared
by the average German at the dawn of the Third Reich.[13]
In 2000, fulfilling the
desire of most historians to easily package the complex into neat and tidy
boxes, Peter Bergmann proposed a historiographical discriminator of the various
theories regarding culpability. These theories he claimed would be classified as
either Destructive, or Evasive. Destructive theories included the Sonderweg School, Intentionalists, and
any that viewed Nazism as a necessary product of the time. Evasive theories sought to minimize the
particular culpability of the people, concentrating on individual villains in
the regime or on spreading blame upon Western appeasers or Soviet tyrants. Published shortly after Goldhagen’s very
successful book that implicated the previously unimpugnable Wehrmacht and the
German people as a whole, Bergmann successfully described the pendulum shifts
in historical theory of the evasive theories posed by West German liberals in
the first years after the war, to the destructive theories of the Fischer Sonderweg school; from the evasive Nolte
and the Historikerstreit period, to the Goldhagen destructive one. Bergmann’s
classification system is very organized and presents a useful tool for
understanding the evolving thoughts on the rise of the National Socialists in
Germany.
Final Thoughts
The culpability and level of knowledge of the
average German will most likely never be fully understood. How could it? How
can one lay blame upon a nation of millions of individuals? How can one absolve
the same nation of individuals for the crimes of a few that took place in their
midst? Certainly the answer lays in the gray area betwixt the two. As with most
historical debates, the farther removed chronologically, or, as the Historikerstreit demonstrated, the
farther removed from contemporary politics, the clearer, less subjective, and
less emotionally charged the study will become. And although Goldhagen’s book
was chided by historians, its reception demonstrated the German willingness to plump
the depths of darkness existing in their collective history.
Works Cited
Bergmann, Peter E. “An Exploration in German
Historiography.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 26,
No 1. Spring 2000, 141-159.
Blackbourn, David and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History:
Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984.
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1996.
Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Schweitzer, Arthur. “Economy and Class Structure of
German Fascism by Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Review.” The Journal of Economic History 40, No. 4. December 1980, 886-887.
Shrier, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1959.
Sontag Raymond J. “The Origins of the Second World
War by A. J. P. Taylor: Review.” The
American Historical Review 67, No. 4. July 1962, 992-994.
Taylor, A. J. P. Origins of the Second World War. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1961.
Torpey, John. “Habermas and the Historians.” New German Critique, No. 44. Spring –
Summer 1988, 5-24.
Weinberg Gerhard L. Germany, Hitler, and World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Works Consulted
Cuomo, Glenn, ed. National Socialist Cultural Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1995.
Echternkamp, Jörg, ed. Germany and the Second World War, Volume IX/I, German Wartime Society
1939-1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.
Ferguson, Niall. The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the
West. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Hancock, Eleanor. The National Socialist Leadership and Total War 1941-5. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991.
Nolte, Ernst. “Die Vergangenheit, die nicht
vergehen will.” Frankfurt Allgemeine
Zeitung, June 6, 1986. Accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.hdg.de/lemo/html/dokumente/NeueHerausforderungen_redeNolte1986/.
Peukert, Detlev J. K. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday
Life. Translated by Richard Deveson. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1987.
Sorge, Martin K. The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military and Civilian Losses
Resulting from World War II. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Steinert, Marlis G. Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude During the
Second World War. Edited and Translated by Thomas E. J. de Witt. Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 1977.
Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Weinberg, Gerhard L. World in the Balance. Behind the Scenes of World War II. London:
University Press of New England, 1981.
Footnotes
[1]
Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and
World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 307-308.
[2]
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War
(New York: Penguin, 2009), 747-748.
[3]
Arthur Schweitzer, “Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism by Alfred
Sohn-Rethel: Review,” The Journal of Economic History 40, No. 4,
(December 1980), 886-887.
[4] A.
J. P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World
War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 12.
[5]
Raymond J. Sontag, “The Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P. Taylor:
Review,” The American Historical Review
67, No. 4 (July 1962), 993.
[6]
William L. Shrier, The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959).
[7]
Peter E. Bergmann, “An Exploration in German Historiography,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 26,
No 1 (Spring 2000), 145.
[8]
Ibid.
[9] David
Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The
Peculiarities of German History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
10.
[10]
John Torpey, “Habermas and the Historians,” New
German Critique, No. 44 (Spring – Summer 1988), 5-6.
[11]
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1996).
[12]
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent
and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
[13]
Ibid.
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