No "big bang" for Shoah

PAT JOHNSON

Historians cannot pin down one moment when the Final Solution was put into practical motion. There is no documentation directly linking the onset of the Nazis' war on Jews with a directive from the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, according to a top Holocaust scholar who spoke in Vancouver on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Identifying the moment when the Nazis' antipathy toward Jews turned to explicitly genocidal mass murder has been a sub-field of historical inquiry since the late 1970s, Prof. Christopher Browning told the packed Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver Jan. 27. Browning is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Ordinary Men, considered a classic in the field of individual collaboration in the Nazi machinery, and The Origins of the Final Solution.

The address marked not only the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, but the opening of the annual Shafran Teachers' Conference, organized by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Society.

Though some maintain that Hitler's intention toward Jews was clear as early as 1919, historical proof that the Nazi leader himself conceived of the plan to kill all the Jews of Europe – and when that plan was officially approved – remains clouded.

"There is no big bang theory," said Browning. "There is no single day when Hitler said, 'We will do this. We will kill all the Jews.' The Nazis edged up to this."
Historians know that there was a plan to kill all Soviet Jews, which began to be implemented when Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union. And, from 1939, the Nazis began a policy of what we would now call "ethnic cleansing," taking territory by force then ridding it of people the Nazis deemed undesirable. But historians remain split, Browning said, on when the decision to kill Soviet Jews was expanded to include all the Jews on the continent.

Two main theories exist to place the timing of the Holocaust's expansion, he said. One theory maintains that the decision was taken in September 1941, a month of great military successes for the Nazis, when they may have believed victory was inevitable and they could turn their attention to the Jews.

A different theory maintains that the decision to implement the Final Solution did not come until December of that year, after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans entered the war. The Germans may have anticipated that, with the United States joining the Allies, the tide of the war would turn and the Nazi imperative to implement the Final Solution became more urgent and may have been considered by the Nazis as a "consolation prize" even if they were to lose the war.

A few documents do narrow the search for a timeline, Browning said. In the summer of 1941, authority was granted by top Nazi leaders to draw up what could be called a feasibility study for carrying out the Nazi policy toward Jews. In September, the first deportations began to shift large numbers of Jews eastward, to Lodz, with the understanding that they would go "further east" the following spring, though what was planned further east remains uncertain. In the fall of 1941, though, death camps were already being constructed and experimentation with Zyklon B was under way. Recent documents discovered in long-secret archives in the former Soviet Union show plans in October 1941 for a new crematorium at Auschwitz.

About that time, also, Nazi policy changed from one in which Jews were encouraged to flee German-controlled territories to one where they were forbidden from leaving, a sign that a significant policy shift was taking place.

Nonetheless, Browning said, no tangible proof yet exists that Hitler himself ordered the beginning of the Final Solution. This is probably due to a number of reasons, he said, including a degree of inevitability, in which developments leading to genocide took place incrementally through what Browning terms "mob decision-making" and the fact that Hitler's decision-making process probably leaned more toward subtle signals to his subordinates than through explicit official correspondence.

More than 400 people attended Browning's lecture. About 60 teachers attended the fourth Shafran teachers' conference, which takes place every two years and allows educators to advance their understanding of the Holocaust and in turn pass that knowledge on to their students. The event is funded by the Dave and Lil Shafran Endowment Fund of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Society.

Pat Johnson is a B.C. journalist and commentator.

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