Vast scholarship effort

GRAHAM FORST

Toronto’s late, great philosopher-historian Emil Fackenheim once said that to the traditional 613 Torah mitzvot, one more must be added – a 614th: “Thou shalt not hand Hitler posthumous victories.” We deny these posthumous victories by committing to remembrance. As one of the contributors to the volume under review put it, “Every day you allow yourself to forget the Shoah is a victory for Hitler. Every day you remember is a victory for those who died in the gas chambers. You choose your victors.”

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, edited by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford University Press, 2010) will help readers choose their victors thoughtfully. It will refresh, develop and fix their memories productively and responsibly. And, one might add, with currency: the scholarship represented here has greatly benefited from the 1989 opening of eastern European war archives (and ongoing discoveries of wartime letters and diaries), giving the OHHS particular relevance for 21st-century readers. (Future Holocaust studies may be even more enriched if the present pope follows through on his promise finally “to open the book” on Paul XII, aka “Hitler’s Pope.”)

The 47 chapters of the OHHS are easily accessible to non-specialist readers, yet are written according to the highest possible academic standards, both in terms of style, content, referential integrity and accuracy. (The redoubtable Deborah Lipstadt, however, records the antisemite David Irving’s famous offer of £1000 for information linking Hitler to the Final Solution as $1,000!)

Like many of its Oxford Handbook predecessors, including The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, this 800-page volume redefines the meaning of “handbook.” Also, the title notwithstanding, it has no connection with England’s Oxford University (except the OUP imprimatur) – nearly all the scholar-contributors to this volume are American, a fact that speaks encouragingly of the level of Holocaust education in the United States. As well, female scholars are generously represented here.

Picking this huge volume up and holding onto it, difficult as it is, will reward greatly. Not a chapter, not a page will be turned without eliciting at least one “I didn’t know that!” or a disbelieving “No!” For example, did you know that the Nazis sterilized Afro-Germans? That when the Germans invaded Poland they shot more than a thousand Roman Catholic priests? That, in spite of the well-recorded dissent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, the German Protestant Church jumped on the Nazi bandwagon with an enthusiasm equal to that of the Catholics’, “greeting the rise of Adolph Hitler as a gift and miracle from God”? That there are more than 100,000 survivor accounts collected since 1944 of which almost 10,000 have been published? That many German doctors were engaged to help survivors in postwar DP camps? That more than one thousand weddings took place in Bergen-Belsen in 1946 (resulting in more than one thousand births!)? That George Patton was a virulent antisemite? That more than half a metric ton of dental gold was sent to Berlin from Auschwitz? That the looting of Jewish assets bequeathed approximately $70 billion dollars to the Nazi war chest?

The approach to the Holocaust in the OHHS is, as it must be, multidisciplinary. The volume is divided into five categories: Enablers (contexts), Protagonists (perpetrators, victims, bystanders), Settings (places and circumstances of persecution), Representations (How can the Holocaust ever be properly “shown” to us?) and Aftereffects (how the Holocaust affected postwar philosophy, religion, politics, ethics).

It’s almost impossible to single out a few of the 47 chapters of the Handbook, but some, even after 40 years of reading Holocaust history, will remain with me.

From the Protagonists section I particularly admired Christopher Browning’s ironically titled “Problem Solvers,” his wonderful exposé of the activities of the “shadowy collection of young officials who staffed the Jewish desks of the German bureaucracy.” Combining “self-conscious ideological conviction” with a “hero-worshipping identification with Hitler,” this army of technocrats, “intoxicated with exercising unfettered power over others and the experiential high of making history,” literally made the Holocaust possible, as Browning convincingly shows.

From the same section, Deborah Dwork’s “Rescuers” is an antidote to Holocaust-engendered cynicism, and Dan Michman’s “Jews” is a brilliant deflation of the old sheep-to-the-slaughter slur. Leonore Weitzman’s “Women” deals eloquently with a topic “scarcely on the agenda” of Holocaust studies – the responsibilities of Jewish women as mothers, wives and daughters during the Nazi era. Faced with forced abortions, ghastly “choices,” barriers to breastfeeding (many consequently watching their children starve), women nonetheless rose to frequent acts of enormous heroism, especially in the role of “courier.” As such, they inspired and helped organize resistance, smuggled weapons into the ghettos and nursed many men to health. They were able often to fend off starvation by sharing recipes and cooking techniques, and deflected despair by working to maintain family ties.

Do you wonder why the Allies didn’t do more to respond to the plight of European Jews? Read Shlomo Aronson’s “The Allies,” also from the Protagonists section. The answer? The Allies needed Muslim support, and needed also a binding future alliance with the Soviets. As such, Aronson writes, “the Allies found making the rescue of Jews a priority too impractical and risky, as well as potentially counterproductive.” This, of course, is why Britain, no less than Canada and the United States, “refused to admit Jews in large numbers during their moment of dire prewar need.” Aronson concludes: “The war on the Jewish ‘front’ [was] a war in which the Allies were complicit protagonists,” making Hitler, “even in death, hugely victorious.”

From the Representations section, Peter Fritzsche’s astonishing “German Documents and Diaries” draws on much newly discovered material to confirm what many have suspected: Germans knew. They knew about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, and the inclusion of women and children in their massacres. They knew about Babi Yar and the death camps. How? Through letters, conversations with friends and husbands on leave, gossip in military canteens in Poland, in bars in Berlin, in railway waiting rooms, train compartments and so on. Ordinary citizens were not ignorant of what had happened to their pre-Nazi-era Jewish doctors and teachers and neighbors, writes Friztsche, but clearly shared in the basking in the Third Reich’s “pages of glory.”

In the same section, Sara Horowitz’s sensitive paper on “Literature” reveals why so little prose of lasting value has emerged from the Holocaust. She recalls Elie Wiesel’s famous comment, “A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz” – the Shoah always runs up against “the limitations of language” and inevitably “pushes against the boundaries of esthetic propriety,” reflecting a problem that this reviewer, in 40 years of teaching, faced every time the issue of assigning Holocaust literature arose.

From Part Five, Aftereffects, Rebecca Wittman’s essay “Punishment” reveals why Nazi crimes and criminals were so haphazardly dealt with postwar. She writes that there was the perceived need to solicit German cooperation against the Soviets, and also the disturbing fact that many of the trials of Nazi defendants were presided over by former Nazi judges. Thus “the vast majority” of Nazi horror perpetrators received “mild sentences” in the Auschwitz trials of 1963-65; and most sentences handed down were soon reduced.

In his essay “Christianity,” Stephen Haynes reveals the role of the church in preparing for the Holocaust, and makes a convincing case that “the actions of Holocaust perpetrators reflect the moral and theological failures of the churches.” In fact, for many Christians, says Haynes, “Nazism meant a return to Christianity,” leading Haynes to the (unsurprising) conclusion that “the church’s christological claims may be in need of revision.”

Were the Nazis “madmen”? No, argues sociologist James Waller in his paper “The Social Sciences.” For the most part, writes Waller, they were “able, intelligent, high-functioning people, who presented no evidence of thought disorder or psychiatric conditions.” Waller draws the right conclusion: “In wilfully failing to exercise moral judgment, perpetrators remain morally and legally accountable for the atrocities they committed. No social scientific ‘insight’ should ever remove or ‘normalize’ that reality.”

The last paper is philosopher John Roth’s consideration of the impact of the Holocaust on philosophical ethical theory. He begins by agreeing with Fackenheim that “philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust.” Which is remarkable, because, as Roth writes, “the Holocaust was wrong or nothing can be.” It shouldn’t have happened. It must not happen again. These are non-relative ethical absolutes.

Nor, as Roth concludes, may we read into the defeat of the Nazis an example of ethical triumphalism. The Holocaust was “too awesome” for such a facile judgment. Thus, “ethics after Auschwitz will need to draw on every resource it can find: appeals to human rights, calls for renewed religious sensitivity, respect and honor for people who save lives and resist atrocity, and attention to the Holocaust’s warnings.” All of which must be built into all of our institutions – religious, educational, business and political.

Will there ever be another Auschwitz? Who can say not? All we can say for certain is contained in the final sentence of the OHHS: we are all obliged “to keep summoning inquiry and discovery, resisting finality and closure in the process” to ensure that Holocaust history is not written in vain.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the Banff School of Fine Arts. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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