Rethinking the Nazi nightmare

Two historians challenge the idea that the Holocaust was unique, describe how anti-Semitism was worse in prewar America than in Germany and compare Hitler & Co. to the '60s generation.

By Suzy Hansen

Oct 2, 2002 | In "Holocaust: A History," authors Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt recount a 1941 conversation between an Italian journalist named Curzio Malaparte and high-ranking Nazi officials shortly after Malaparte toured the Warsaw ghetto. Malaparte asked the Germans about the massacre earlier that year of 7,000 Jews by Romanian police and soldiers. One Nazi, Gov. Gen. Hans Frank, replied, "I share and I understand your horror at the Jassy massacres. As a man, a German and as Governor-General of Poland I disapprove of pogroms ... We Germans are guided by reason and method and not by bestial instincts; we always act scientifically ... Have you perchance even seen a massacre of Jews in the streets of a German city? ... Yet, within a short time, not a single Jew will be left in Germany."

As Dwork and van Pelt show, many Nazis, and especially the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, believed themselves to be "decent" and "surgical" murderers, performing a great and laborious sacrifice for the good of Germany. Throughout their absorbing history, Dwork and van Pelt reveal the dark complexities behind the Nazis' war crimes -- the rationalization of mass murder, the emergence of the "final solution," the small events that drive an ordinary man to commit acts of genocide, the equally small events that turn other ordinary men into heroes. As Dwork explained to Salon in a recent phone interview, the Holocaust was a phenomenon that evolved as the war progressed, rather than something that was meticulously planned. Each decision and act built on the last, and ultimately constructed a catastrophe.

Dwork, a professor of history at Clark University, and van Pelt, a professor of cultural history at the University of Waterloo, are also the authors of "Auschwitz." In this latest effort, they have plowed through mountains of source material in order to place the Holocaust, often treated as a singular event in human history, within the framework of the history of Western civilization -- with surprising and fascinating results.

What's different about this history of the Holocaust? What were you aiming for when you conceived it?

Debórah Dwork: We were aiming to step back, widen the lens. Often people think about the Holocaust as something that was outside of time, an aberration. If you ask, "When did the Holocaust start?" [most people] don't know. Our goal was to fit the history of the Holocaust into the context of Western civilization so that people could begin to look at it as part of a larger piece.

So you don't think that the Holocaust was an aberration?

Dwork: No, I don't.

Why?

Robert Jan van Pelt: [In our book] we look at the nature of European racism in the 19th century. A combination of racist fury and nationalism had a deep and profound emotional reverberation in the collective imagination of people. Both of those created a very strong sense that there was an in group and an out group. The emancipation of the Jews just happened to happen right at that time. If it had happened a century earlier, maybe it wouldn't have been the Jews who were selected for the Holocaust.

Second, the First World War was a catastrophic and cataclysmic event which really shook up all the values and certainties in European society. The war introduced the idea of mass death and mass murder -- as in the Armenian genocide -- as permanent parts of the European imagination, certainly the German imagination. Both of these things created a landscape in which ultimately the Holocaust could be contemplated by someone like Hitler in 1941.

You write that Hitler said, "Whoever thinks about the Armenians anymore?" Do you think that that genocide had a great effect on him?

Dwork: Yes, I do. It was a powerful model for him.

You also argue that the Inquisition and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution were precedents for the Holocaust. Can you explain?

Van Pelt: The Inquisition and the French Revolution rejected the idea that those who live in a society have a right to live there. What the Inquisition formulates is that there is a group [of people] that stands between us and salvation and that group has to be removed if it cannot be converted. The French Revolution did the same thing. It broke with a traditionalist idea that what is inherited -- even things that we can't really cope with, like, for example, Jews -- deserves a place because God wants it to be there. Both the Inquisition and the French Revolution had this revolutionary idea that people can radically change society and that will bring them to the Promised Land. That is something which the Nazis -- and for that matter the Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s -- adopted. Ultimately, it's going to be the Jews or it's going to be the Kulaks or any other group that's perceived to stand in the way. They will become the victim. And it has genocidal implications.

Dwork: Why is it that hundreds of thousands of people are persuaded to get up every morning and go out and kill people? It's not because they are bloodthirsty creatures. It's because they believe they have embraced an ideology of salvation. In the case of the Inquisition, it's a religious salvation: "We can achieve salvation and we have to get rid of the Jews to do it." In the case of the French Revolution, it's a secular salvation: "We can create a new society." The same is true with the Nazi era. The reason why all these Germans were persuaded to act as they did was not because of sadistic delight, or the sexual pleasure of bloodthirstiness. It was built on this ideology of creating the perfect Germany.

Next Page: "Germans were not the perfect, genocidal anti-Semites"

• View blog reactions