No, I don't think that we will ever reach a satisfactory understanding of the Holocaust. Here were the countrymen of Goethe and Schiller, systematically and brutally killing six million people, with nary a hesitation or protest from anyone -- why this could have happened remains a terrible mystery. But insofar as any one book can come close an explanation, by way of a comprehensive description of these ghastly events and their background, this new very large, very well documented volume by Saul Friedländer will stand as the best, and certainly most up-to-date general work on the subject.
First the good news.
Even to someone who is well read in the existing literature, Friedländer has much to say. I myself can say that I learned something new on almost every page. Friedländer has used, judiciously, the vast monographic work that has appeared in German, Hebrew, English, and French. And he has done this while staying clear of the often petty polemics and displays of writer's vanity that have become so prominent in this field.
The result of Friedländer's synthesis is a new overall picture - made up of familiar partial pictures - that allows us to understand far better than before the overall sweep of the events that we call the Holocaust.
Most important, we see Adolf Hitler as the most powerful influence on what happened. The conditions that enabled Hitler's exterminationist fury can be seen as a number of progressively weaker circles of influence (although Friedländer does not organize his materials in this way): the Nazi ideological elite and its theology of racism, the criminal participation of the Wehrmacht (German army), the overwhelming support of an anti-Semitic German public, the anti-Semitic atmosphere in much of the rest of Europe, the indifference and anti-Semitism of the Christian churches and especially the Vatican, the indifference and sometimes anti-Semitism of Western governments, and, last in importance but not in interest to Friedländer, the failure of world Jewry to rise to the demands of the tragedy.
So there are plenty of villains but few, if any, heroes.
I think that, on the whole, Friedländer's judgments are sound and born out by his evidence. Nevertheless it must be said that some of the very virtues of this book have entailed missteps that Friedländer has not been altogether able to avoid.
I The Sources
Aside from his effective use of diaries and autobiographies by participants and victims, Friedländer has almost completely relied on secondary sources. A great many other scholars have spent innumerable hours in archives and interviewing participants and Friedländer's up-to-date, systematic and apparently comprehensive use of these sources is a great strength in this book.
But Friedländer also uses sources whose quality cannot be judged by the reader.
Throughout the book Friedländer presents excerpts from letters that Wehrmacht soldiers sent home on the subject of Jews. These letters, full of hatred for Jews, uniformly condone the killings and sometimes even report Wehrmacht participation in the murders.
But to what extent are these letters representative of what the mass of German soldiers wrote to their families? Just about all the excerpts that Friedländer presents come from a slim little volume "Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung, " a collection edited by Walter Manoschek and published by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung in 1995. I consulted this volume, and even wrote to both its editor and publisher, but I was unable to obtain any information about how this collection of letters was selected. My gut feeling is that the collection is typical of what German soldiers wrote at the time. But gut feeling is not quite knowledge, and for knowledge, which is what scholarship is supposed to be about, we need detailed information about how the documents that are quoted were selected. The information that we get is tertiary: there are the letter writers, there is the editor of these letters (Manoschek), and finally there is Friedländer who quotes Manoschek who quotes the soldiers. There are too many unknowns in this chain of evidence.
II The Mechanical Chronologism
Technically, the present book is but a concluding second volume to Friedländer's earlier "Nazi Germany and the Jews," dealing with the years from 1933 to 1939, which he published with HarperCollins in 1997. The present volume is subtitled "Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945," and, generally, does not mention events before 1939.
But unlike the first volume, this second volume is very strictly organized by chronology. Each of its ten chapters deals with a few months of the period from September of 1939 to May of 1945. There is no introductory material to tell the reader what happened before September of 1939, nor is there an epilogue of any sort to tell him what came afterwards. The result is a somewhat ahistorical, almost newspaper-like recounting of events as they occurred. If you want to know what happened in Holland under German occupation, say, you will look in vain for a continuous or even coherent account. What happened in Holland in early 1940 is told in Chapter Two, what happened in late 1940 and 1941 is told in Chapter Three, and so forth.
The difficulty of following any one theme is aggravated by the inadequate index. The important topic of Hitler's use of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," for instance, is once mentioned on page 19, in the chapter devoted to events from September 1939 to May 1940. The matter is taken up again on pages 475-6, in a chapter on the period from March 1943 to October 1943. But the index, under "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," mentions only the earlier entry.
In at least one case, this mechanical chronology has resulted in a fairly serious distortion.
The oppositional German Protestant clergymen of the "Bekennende Kirche" ['Confessional Church'], BK, are mentioned in a number of chapters, generally to point attention to the fact that even these brave men who stood up to the Nazis were infected, to some extent, by anti-Semitic sentiments. Friedländer singles out one of their outstanding leaders, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for being "ambivalent" on the Jewish question (p. 575).
But, as it happens, the best known of the BK leaders, together with Bonhoeffer, was Pastor Martin Niemöller. Niemöller became widely known in the West after the war when he enlisted in left wing and anti-American causes and thus became a hero to the European and American Left. Yes, Hitler had imprisoned him for his BK activities, but, during the whole Nazi period, except for his religious views, he had been a National Socialist. His vicious anti-Semitic utterances and sermons are well documented, until at least 1936. But Niemöller does not exist to the readers of the present volume, a circumstance that can only bolster his totally undeserved reputation as a "good German" in the Hitler period.
Like all other scholars of the period, Friedländer is well aware of Niemöller's anti-Semitism, and, in fact, has written about it ten years ago, in the first volume of his present work (p. 45). But the incident that he reports there took place in 1936, and thus, in accordance with his strict chronology, is not mentioned in his present volume, which begins with 1939.
Friedländer here clearly does not serve his readers' interest, or that of understanding, by having a blind chronologism cut up history.
III Inclusions and Omissions
Nowhere in Friedländer's book is there a mention of the activities of Hitler's one major Arab supporter during the "years of extermination": the Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
As I have already suggested, Friedländer is extraordinarily comprehensive in his list of social forces and individuals whom he considers as partially responsible for the Holocaust. He never loses sight, of course, of the major culprits, viz. Hitler and his immediate followers. But he also finds room, lots of it, for dishonorable mentions of many others: the German public, Christian religious institutions throughout the world, the governments of the West and of neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden, the anti-Semitic man-in-the-street in just about every European country, and many others. (But Friedländer fails to mention, in a minor but curious omission from his index of villains, that the French Communist Party in the era of the Stalin-Hitler Pact did not hesitate to engage in a spot of Jew-baiting (1)).
Perhaps more than other writers on the Holocaust, Friedländer is insistent and repetitive in his criticism and condemnation of Jewish shortcomings during these dark years. The Jews of Palestine, with Ben Gurion as their leader, were selfish, narrow-minded, and lacked an adequate spirit of self-sacrifice (pp. 153, 305, 596, etc.). The Jews of Europe generally? A " sauve qui peut " mentality (pp. 192, 355, etc.). The Jewish leaders of Amsterdam? "A wealthy Jewish haute bourgeoisie" , oblivious of its human responsibilities (p. 181). American Jewish leaders? The less said the better (pp. 85, etc.) These critical comments border on the moralistic and ahistorical. In hindsight, yes, these men and women were blind, shortsighted, and less than fully courageous. But -- need I say this to a historian? -- there were constraints of the times in which they lived, constraints that are just a bit too often forgotten by Friedländer.
But while these Jews, including the Jews of Palestine, cannot escape the criticisms of Friedländer, another Palestinian at the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, enjoys the writer's strange indulgence. Friedländer mentions the Mufti but once, on page 277, where we are told that Hitler informs him, the Mufti, that he, Hitler, would be "uncompromising" about the Jews, including the Jews of Palestine. But neither here, nor anywhere in his book, nor in the first volume of this book, does Friedländer give a hint about the Mufti's words or the Mufti's activities.
These activities, in brief, were pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic. There were anti-Semitic messages to Arabs who were enlisted in Allied armies, asking them to desert to avoid fighting for "the Jews" (2). The Mufti also interceded with the Germans to prevent the exchange of prisoners that could have saved thousands of Jewish children from the Holocaust. The Mufti spent the last years of the war in Berlin. While Arab writers have often tried to ignore the Mufti's work for Hitler (3), at least one Arab scholar has written an influential study that presents the essential facts. (4)
In short, the Mufti of Jerusalem was a far more important player in the Holocaust than many of the minor figures that make up Friedländer's index of villains. They are all given dishonorable mention - usually for good cause. But the Mufti, well known to Friedländer as we have seen, has escaped his censure. Why?
So here we have it. Two cheers, by all means, for this outstanding work of historical writing. I have no doubt that when the second edition rolls around there will be reformulations and emendations, and new thoughts that we will have to ponder. I am getting ready to give it the fulsome three cheers it will - let us hope - deserve so fully.
NOTES
(1) Edward Mortimer, The Rise of the French Communist Party, 1920-1947 , London, 1984, p. 289.
(2) Gerhard Höpp, Edit., Mufti-Papiere. Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil, 1940-145 , Berlin, 2001.
(3) See for instance Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness , New York, 1997. The author describes Husseini"s pre-war activities, and also mentions Mattar's book (see below) as "the best treatment of the subject," but he himself never once mentions Husseini's work for the Nazis.
(4) Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem , New York, 1988. The most satisfactory work on the Mufti that I have seen is by Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti , London, 1993. The 1988 study by Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem, does not seem to be available in libraries in the New York area. A new work that will utilize new sources, in Arabic and other languages, is in preparation by Wolfgang G. Schwanitz.
Werner Cohn
July 30, 2007, revised Aug. 4, 2007
Update, January 11, 2008
There is now an indispensable review of this book by the distinguished Oxford historian Peter Pulzer. Pulzer does not at all deal with the points I have raised. But he describes and evaluates the book, as only a distinguised specialist can, in the context of all the other scholarship on the subject. He gives very high marks to the book, but, more importantly, he also tells us what is known, and what remains to be known, about the Holocaust. See the Times Literary Supplement of January 4, 2008.
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