The Holocaust

Jeremy Black

Description

Brilliant and wrenching, The Holocaust: History and Memory tells the story of the brutal mass slaughter of Jews during World War II and how that genocide has been remembered and misremembered ever since. Taking issue with generations of scholars who separate the Holocaust from Germany's military ambitions, historian Jeremy M. Black demonstrates persuasively that Germany's war on the Allies was entwined with Hitler's war on Jews. As more and more territory came under Hitler's control, the extermination of Jews became a major war aim, particularly in the east, where many died and whole Jewish communities were exterminated in mass shootings carried out by the German army and collaborators long before the extermination camps were built. Rommel's attack on Egypt was a stepping stone to a larger goal—the annihilation of 400,000 Jews living in Palestine. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler saw America's initial focus on war with Germany rather than Japan as evidence of influential Jewish interests in American policy, thus justifying and escalating his war with Jewry through the Final Solution. And the German public knew. In chilling detail, Black unveils compelling evidence that many everyday Germans must have been aware of the genocide around them. In the final chapter, he incisively explains the various ways that the Holocaust has been remembered, downplayed, and even dismissed as it slips from horrific experience into collective consciousness and memory. Essential, concise, and highly readable, The Holocaust: History and Memory bears witness to those forever silenced and ensures that we will never forget their horrifying fate.

Preface
1. Until Barbarossa
2. Towards Genocide
3. Genocide
4. Germany's Allies
5. Memorialization
6. The Holocaust and Today
7. Conclusions
Notes
Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253022189
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE
HOLOCAUST
THE
HOLOCAUST
HISTORY AND MEMORY
JEREMY BLACK
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B. Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Jeremy Black
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Black, Jeremy, 1955- author.
Title: The Holocaust : history and memory / Jeremy M. Black.
Description: Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2016] | ?2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006405 (print) | LCCN 2016006610 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022042 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253022141 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253022189 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Classification: LCC D804.3 .B559 2016 (print) | LCC D804.3 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18 - dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006405
ISBN 978-0-253-02204-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02214-1 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-253-02218-9 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For a Branch of My Family I Never Met
Contents
PREFACE
1 Until Barbarossa
2 Toward Genocide
3 Genocide
4 Germany s Allies
5 Memorialization
6 The Holocaust and Today
7 Conclusions
NOTES
INDEX
Preface
THE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST, OR SHOAH, NEEDS REVISITING in the face of continuing attempts to deny its veracity or scope. The arrest of David Irving in Austria in 2005, on the charge of Holocaust denial, served as a pointed reminder of its contentious character and, that year Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran, publicly joined the sordid ranks of the deniers. In fact, Adolf Hitler s determination to rid Europe of Jews and what he saw as Jewish ideas in all their manifestations, was central to his ultimate goal of establishing a thousand-year Reich (German empire). The opportunity was provided by the extensive German conquests in the early stages of World War II, and the history of the Holocaust in part properly belongs to that of the war. Although this might seem an obvious point, it is challenged by the range of work on aspects of the war that underplays or ignores the Holocaust and other Jewish themes. 1 Indeed, I deliberately included a volume on the Holocaust in the seven-volume collection of articles and essays on the war by various scholars that I edited in 2007. The present book, which builds on an earlier book published in 2008, is written in part in response to the continuation of Holocaust denial and also because of the need for a short introductory study.
The spate of Holocaust denial during the 1990s and the 2000s was the clarion call for the writing and publication of my 2008 book. The context for it was: the mounting evasiveness, downplaying, and even denial of the Holocaust in certain European and non-European circles; the challenges these vexatious developments posed to Western civilization; and apprehension over what these foibles could portend for civil society. It is alarming that in the years following 2008 the implications of these developments have become even more palpable. Anti-Semitism is increasingly visible in certain European states. The book seeks to bring to readers attention-through direct, detailed, and thematically oriented prose-the backdrop, the events, and the history of memories and perspectives of the Holocaust, so as to educate readers and would-be sceptics of one of the most defining events of World War II and the modern era, and warn them of the costs of ignoring it. This study clearly demonstrates the perils that flow from embracing historical fallacies and inattentiveness, and the horrendous civilizational costs that result from such acceptances.
The complex roots of the slaughter are discussed in the first two chapters. The German extermination policies that led to the Holocaust that consumed much of European Jewry were the culmination of powerful currents in nineteenth-century thought, as refracted through the prism of Nazi ideology and Hitler s messianic fantasies. There is an emphasis in the book on the extent to which Hitler s military strategy and the one-sided genocidal war against Jews cannot be detached from each other. Indeed, the slaughter of Jews should be part of the analysis of the German conduct of the war. This study underlines the importance of the killings by Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), especially mass shootings, alongside the more usual emphasis on the slaughter in the extermination camps.
This slaughter reflected the extent to which the war was a brutal struggle between different visions and practices of modernism and modernization: Nazi ideology, therefore, was at once anti-modernist in that it sought to destroy other visions and practices, but also had modernist visions and practices in its own way. In Nazi minds, Jews represented, and personified, at once an anachronistic past, in their traditional customs and separateness from the modern unitary nation but, also, far more dangerously, a different modernism. Or rather modernisms, for Jews were seen by the Nazis as highly prominent in, and shaping, if not directing, capitalism, Communism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, socialism, and much of modern culture and thought. This Nazi paranoia captures the extent to which Jews were spread across much of the world and, particularly, allegedly prominent in its most dominant economy and most active culture, the United States. Moreover, although many Jews were not part of modernization, a large number, especially among those who assimilated, were influential precisely because they were involved in modern and liberal projects. The role of Jews in both physics and Hollywood was indicative of the wider situation.
The Holocaust is also of separate significance, not only as the most brutal episode of anti-Semitism and a warning of where that most stupid of attitudes can lead, but as a formative background to the creation and ethos of the state of Israel. The Holocaust is also an indication of where ethnic and organic notions of the state can proceed. The treatment of the Holocaust in these pages requires explanation because so much space is devoted to postwar discussion and memorialization (a lengthy Chapter 5 ) and to consideration of the Holocaust today ( Chapter 6 ). This emphasis is not in pursuit of some absurd postmodern relativism but, rather, because the subject of the Holocaust is, at once, the brutal mass slaughter of the Jews perpetrated by the Germans and their allies and, yet, also the postwar consideration of this slaughter. Discussion of the consideration does not in any way lessen the slaughter, but simply notes that, as personal recollection fades with the passing generation, it is through this consideration that the Holocaust is grasped. It is, for example, through postwar films, such as Schindler s List (1993), as much as, if not far more than, through wartime photography, that the Holocaust is understood visually, and that process is increasingly important-both for a society for which the visual is supplanting the literary as means and medium of thought, and in order to confront the widespread loss of shock. Given the dominance of German documentation for the surviving written official sources on the Holocaust, the subsequent publication of memoirs and the visual account are of even greater consequence. Free showings for schools of Schindler s List in the United States helped make it an apparently canonical text on the Holocaust.
Moreover, memorialization of the Holocaust throws light on postwar societies, on the contentious nature of World War II, and on the persistence of anti-Semitism. As such, however ahistorically, it also offers gleams of understanding about the policies and attitudes that made the Holocaust not only possible but also a terrible reality. Thus, the Holocaust was not only an event, but also a process with short-term and long-term implications. This was also the historical situation, as the Holocaust reflected not only short-term elements but also a multiplicity of factors that ranged more widely in time.
How this situation and process was then treated by subsequent generations is of major significance. Most obviously, in postwar Germany and among its wartime allies, recognition of the Holocaust was often suppressed or minimized in an attempt to minimize connivance in, or acceptance of, the treatment of Jews.
Since writing my earlier study in 2007, I have had the opportunity for additional work, not least as a result of visits to Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Europe is covered with sites and, increasingly, memorials and museums. Each is different-Salonika (Thessaloniki) is not Paris-reflecting not only the contrasting experiences of the local Jews, but also styles and contexts of memorialization. The common theme is loss; the loss of individual life, the loss of Jewish communities, and the loss for Europe.
It is both appropriate to be emotive when writing about the Hol