Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past, by Richard J. Evans. 1989. Pantheon Books, New York

The Third Reich and Communism: Their Legacy. How Germany Has Not Confronted Her Past, Despite the Bogus Whitewash-Germans Charge Raised in the Historikerstreit

Historian Richard J. Evans mixes details about the Third Reich with the German reaction to the aftermath. I focus on matters of lasting interest.

THE PERSISTENCE OF INSINCERE GERMAN CONTRITION FOR NAZISM

Historian Evans identifies a period of German silence about Nazism in the first decades after WWII, followed by greater candor about Nazism starting in the 1970’s. However, he tacitly admits that even this belated “confrontation” and “repentance” was still mostly talk. He writes, “As the students of 1968 became the teachers of the 1970s, serious and honest treatment of the Third Reich in German schools and universities became more usual. Of course, this process had its limits. Many war criminals still went unpunished. Many ex-Nazis remained in positions of power and authority.” (p. 14).

GERMAN REPENTANCE FOR NAZISM: LARGELY LIMITED TO CRIMES AGAINST JEWS

Evans comments, “West Germans were prepared to denounce the attempted extermination of the Jews, and all the horrors that went with the name ‘Auschwitz.’ But this served to some extent as a means of putting off contemplating Nazism’s lesser crimes, which had either been committed, often with conservative complicity, throughout the Third Reich’s existence, or been carried on outside the extermination camps, in the rest of occupied Europe, during the war.” (p. 12). Evans cites the Nazi German euthanasia program. He does not mention, but should consider, the Nazi genocide of Poles.

DO NOT BLAME THE GERMAN-MADE HOLOCAUST ON CHRISTIANITY OR ON PRE-EXISTING GENERIC ANTISEMITISM

One common German-guilt-evasion tactic is to blame the Holocaust on non-German causes. This also enables Jews to use the Holocaust as a weapon against non-Germans. Historian Evans realizes the dubiousness of the practice of seeking deeper causes for the Holocaust. He writes, “The question of whether the ‘Final Solution’ was the product of Hitler’s will alone, or the outcome of broader historical processes, has been debated by historians for much longer than the present controversy. It has been bedeviled by several major problems of evidence.” (p. 73). No kidding!

DO NOT BELITTLE COMMUNIST CRIMES. SOME LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS ON COMMUNIST CRIMES: FORCED COLLECTIVATION

Author Evans, adhering to the Holocaust supremacist line, repeats the standard claim that all Jews were targeted for annihilation, and that this is supposed to make the Holocaust qualitatively different from any other crime. He never explains why an inferred total genocide is supposed to be one iota more significant than “only” a partial genocide. Besides, it is untrue, but that is another subject.

Even though Evans is not sympathetic to direct comparisons of the Jews’ Holocaust with any other genocide, and has a negative view of Ernst Nolte, he realizes that the attempted marginalization of Communist crimes is fallacious.  He warns, “The aims of collectivization–the final subjugation of the countryside to Bolshevik rule and its conversion to a source of food to support the forced industrialization which Stalin was pushing through at the same time–were achieved with ruthless brutality. It is not true to say, as some of Nolte’s critics have done, that only those who opposed collectivization were deported or killed, and all peasants had to do to survive was to agree to give up their private farms. Local police and party officials were often issued with ‘quotas’ of kulaks to be dealt with that were unrelated to the real numbers of kulaks or opponents of collectivization. Definitions of kulaks varied widely. Many peasants had no choice as to whether they survived or not.” (p. 87).