The Holocaust In Historical Perspective (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies) by Yehuda Bauer

The Holocaust In Historical Perspective (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies) Reviews

• 
  Paul Bryant

  Yehuda Bauer is one of the greatest thinkers about the Holocaust I have yet read. The best section of this book is called
  
  "Against mystification: and against false over-emotionalism, mythical extravagances and self-serving falsifications"
  
  Here he discusses a very thorny question (well, aren't they all) - was the Holocaust unique? Certainly many people for various reasons try to deny this uniqueness by using the term in other contexts, calling slavery the Black Holocaust, or equating the Holocaust to genocide and finding genocidal explosions in several contemporary places, Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda. And also it is hastily pointed out that the Nazi regime slaughtered millions of non-Jews too. But I believe the Holocaust was unique because it was a serious attempt to exterminate - kill - every living Jew, man, woman, child, whether able-bodied or infirm, wherever they may be, in every territory the Nazis controlled. And no government has ever tried to do that. The process was, indeed, chaotic and only became mechanised with Henry Ford conveyor-belt efficiency in 1942, and certainly the Nazis did not come to power in 1933 vowing to do this thing, it was something which developed. First they tried to expel the Jews (but no countries would take so many), then they kicked around some crazy ideas like the Madagascar Plan (that's right, put them all on a boat and send them to Madagascar). Didn't work out. Then, between 1939 and 1941, Hitler and a handful of other leaders made the decision: kill them all. They were so driven that they only temporarily used Jews as slave labour, and the labourers did not last long. And this in the middle of a total war when Germany needed all the manpower it could get.
  Bauer says that to fail to see this difference between the Holocaust and other genocidal acts is to mystify history. But therefore to declare that because of its uniqueness the Holocaust is inexplicable is also to mystify history.
  Bauer hedges his argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust with this passage from Raul Hilberg :
  
  I am never going to use the word 'unique' because I recognise that when one starts breaking it into pieces, which is my trade, one finds completely recognisable , ordinary ingredients that are common to other situations, such as Rwanda or Cambodia and possibly many others I have not examined. In the final analysis it depends whether we want to emphasise the commonality with other events or the holistic totality - in which case the Holocaust stands by itself. But I consider the latter perilous. The alternative is to see the Holocaust as outside of history, as not part of anything. And it is impossible to learn from something that is so apart.
  
  Bauer also discusses the Holocaust deniers, who seem to me to be a hapless loathsome bunch. These fools first say that it never happened. When that doesn't wash, in the face of the mountain of Nazi documentation (they loved to count their victims) they say oh okay, it did happen, but only 1 million died intentionally, the rest by disease. When that's disproved they say oh okay, it did happen, and it was 6 million, but Hitler never knew about it (!) and also it happened because the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis (!). The deniers wish to rehabilitate Hitler, so you can tell they must be a little bit stupid. But stupid people vote, it's one of the big flaws in democracy. The British National Party, led by a guy who celebrates Hitler's birthday each year, won two seats in the European Parliament.
  Bauer is also very good in condemning the novelists and poets who use the Holocaust as a source of religious mysticism, and the academics who turn the Holocaust into a sub-branch of history on an equal footing with (say) the study of the rise of the silk industry in France.
  The Holocaust is one of the most brutally challenging facts of modern history. I was a bit shocked when my daughter Georgia - aged 14 - told me all about their Holocaust lesson, which came with ghetto and camp footage. I mean, this is R-rated history, isn't it? I can only compare it with the catastrophe of Stalinism - they're both on a terrifying vast scale of tragedy and they both have profoundly horrible statements to make about the nature of us humans. I don't know how we will ever walk out of their shadow.
  
  LADY MACBETH
  Here's the smell of the blood still: all the
  perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
  hand. Oh, oh, oh!
  
  DOCTOR:
  What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged.
  
  LADY MACBETH
  What's done cannot be undone.
  
• 
  Andrew

  An intriguing collection of historical essays/chapters on the Holocaust. It's quite dated, but comes from one of the best historians around. Definitely worth a perusal, even if the final chapter is quite difficult to truly understand.