Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2 page)

Sipo

Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police)

SK

Sonderkommando

Sopade

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social

Democratic Party)

SS

Schutzstaffel (Protection Squads)

SSPF

SS and Police Commander

StA

Staatsarchiv

STA

Staatsanwaltschaft

StdF

Stellvertreter des Führers (Führer’s Deputy)

StS

State Secretary

SWCA

Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual

TSD

Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente

USHM

United States Holocaust Museum

VB

Völkischer Beobachter

VfZ

Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte

VO

Decree

VOGG

Verordnungsblatt für das Generalgouvernement

Vomi

Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Agency)

VZ

Vossische Zeitung

WL

Wiener Library

WVHA

SS Business and Administration Head Office

YIVO

Yiddischer Vissenschaftlikher Institut

YV

Yad Vashem

YVS

Yad Vashem Studies

ZAA

Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie

ZASM

Zentrum zur Aufbewahrung historisch-dokumentarischer

Sammlungen Moskau

z.b.V

zur besonderer Verwendung (for special purposes)

ZfG

Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft

Abbreviations

xiii

ZGO

Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins

ZOB

Zydowsk Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish combat organization)

ZSt

Zentralstelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung

nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen

ZUV

Zentraler Untersuchungsvorgang

ZZW

Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Association)

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INTRODUCTION

Current State of Research, Methodology

When the German edition of this book appeared twelve years ago in 1998

research on the situation of the murder of the European Jews was in a

transitional state because of the opening of the Eastern European archives at

the beginning of the 1990s. An intensive phase of research had begun using a

large number of documents that had hitherto been inaccessible and asking new

questions of more familiar material. Holocaust research had become a steadily

developing field and now, at the point when this English edition is being

prepared, this process of development has by no means ceased. If it seemed

extremely ambitious in the late 1990s to undertake a comprehensive account of

the persecution and murder of the European Jews from the perspective of the

perpetrators, it is no less so now.

The original aim of this book was to make a contribution to the lively debate

amongst Holocaust researchers about when the Nazi leadership took the decision

to implement a ‘final solution’ (Endlösung) to what they called the ‘Jewish question’

(Judenfrage). Via an analysis of the processes of decision-making, the book hoped

to offer an explanation of the causes of the terrible events that constituted the

Holocaust. When I began preparing this book in the mid-1990s, the state of

so-called ‘perpetrator research’ was defined by two opposing schools of thought:

on the one side were the ‘intentionalists’,
1
who made the focus of their analysis the intentions and objectives of Hitler and other leading Nazis, and on the other were

the ‘structuralists’, who emphasized the importance of the bureaucratic apparatus

put in place by the Nazis and the ultimately uncontrollable process of what Hans

Mommsen termed ‘cumulative radicalization’. The debate between the two schools

of thought had at that point moved through all the usual phases of academic

debates—hypotheses had been developed, the different sides had confronted each

other, arguments had been improved and intensified, positions had become

entrenched, and the discussion had become increasingly polarized. Research on

the decision to implement a ‘final solution’ had become deeply embedded within

2

Introduction

this debate and followed the basic pattern that intentionalist scholars assumed the

decision had been reached at an early point—in the context of the attack on the

Soviet Union or even in the period preceding this
2
—whilst functionalists either assumed, like Christopher Browning, that the decision had been taken in the

autumn of 1941,
3
and took the form of a step-by-step process,
4
or took the view that the mass murder of the Jews was the result of developments within the Nazis’

apparatus of power that ultimately tended towards a ‘final solution’ without there

being any need for an explicit decision to be taken.
5
Saul Friedländer and Raul Hilberg took a position midway between the two by opting for ‘Summer 1941’.
6
In 1997 the debate was revived once more by a suggestion made by Christian Gerlach

to the effect that a decision on the ‘Final Solution’ was made in December 1941 as a

direct reaction to the entry of the United States into the war.
7

The fact that such divergent interpretations were possible is partly explicable by

the context of the heated debate between intentionalists and functionalists and

their apparently irreconcilable, even mutually antagonistic positions. The style in

which this debate was conducted—in the particularly dogmatic manner typical of

controversies between German historians—strongly affected the overall character

of research on the history of Holocaust perpetrators. Even after the intentionalist-

functionalist debate died down, research on the perpetrators in recent years has

continued to be dominated by strong dichotomies.

This needs to be explained in more detail. Far from receding, in the last ten

years the flood of new work on the Holocaust has swollen. This is particularly true

of research into the perpetrators, the so-called Täterforschung, a facet of Holocaust

research that is overwhelmingly though not exclusively the province of German

scholars. Within the field of Täterforschung there are clearly three areas in which

work has been concentrated: first, the study of the apparatus and membership of

the SS and Police, in which the principal focus has been on the Security Police

(Sicherheitspolizei) and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst),
8
concentration camps,
9
the bodies responsible for deportations,
10
and the Einsatzgruppen or other murder squads;
11
second, regional research so that we now have almost complete coverage of the implementation of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe;
12
third, attempts to find new thematic approaches to the topic of the Holocaust such as ways of

establishing a connection between the mass murders and economic planning,
13

vast projects for the deportation of whole ethnic groups,
14
the National Socialists’

forced labour programme (Arbeitseinsatz),
15
or the expropriation of Jewish property,
16
amongst other areas.

Just as was the case in the debate between structuralists and intentionalists, here

too similar attempts can be discerned to try to shape the discussion along the lines

of major dichotomies: regional research has initiated a discussion of the role of

‘centre and periphery’,
17
and the appearance of works emphasizing the ‘utilitarian’—which is to say material—interests that were at stake in the murder of the

Jews have led to the opposition of ‘ideology’ and ‘rationality’. Within the context

Introduction

3

of the disagreement between Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen on the

motivation of the executions (Todesschützen) in the police battalions a debate

emerged about whether the perpetrators were mainly driven to carry out these

killings by ‘situational’ factors or whether they were predisposed towards these

crimes by the anti-Semitic milieu in which they grew up.
18
The tendency of recent research to emphasize an individual's mindset or Weltanschauung, his capacity for

independent initiative and the room for manoeuvre available to him is clearly a

counter-trend to the older image of a perpetrator at a desk, merely carrying out

orders within anonymous structures, behaving like a cog in a great machine.
19

Whilst such dichotomies and polarized debates can be of use to research, they

create the danger that—as was the case with the debate between the intentionalists

and structuralists—new polemics are kindled without ever leading to significantly

new insights into their subject matter. It seems to me that Holocaust research has

now reached a point where the debate has to reach out beyond such oppositions

and dichotomies and become accustomed to a mode of discussion that is more

complex in structure. It is clear that the battles between one-dimensional explan-

ations can no longer do justice to the complexity of the object of our study—the

systematic murder of the European Jews.

The more research develops and is intensified, the more obvious it becomes that

oppositional pairings such as intention and function, centre and periphery, ration-

ality and ideology, situation or disposition are not mutually exclusive but illumin-

ate varying aspects of historical reality in complementary, even interdependent

ways.
20
However, when one attempts to read the relationship of the antagonisms defined as so irreconcilable by historical research in dialectical terms, it seems

virtually pointless to keep on trying to play off one element of the opposition

against the other. The contradictions can only be resolved if they are regarded as

the starting point for developing historical connections on a higher level.

For example, if one looks back on the debate between structuralists and

intentionalists with a degree of hindsight, it becomes clear that both schools

have emphasized differing aspects of the same phenomenon that on closer

inspection prove to be by no means mutually exclusive. People who pursue

their intention to carry out mass murder do so within certain structures; these

structures do not act of their own volition, they do so via human beings who

combine their actions with intentions. It is the same with centre and periphery: as

will be shown as this study progresses, the initiatives of Nazi potentates in the

various regions of Germany were an essential component of centrally managed

policies, but the leadership role of the centre was itself safeguarded by competi-

tiveness between the various functionaries. Similarly the ‘pragmatic’ basis for Nazi

Judenpolitik—Aryanization, the confiscation of living space, the exploitation of

the labour force, and so on—was matched up with ideological strategies designed

to justify it; and at the same time Nazi ideology was itself validated by the

‘successes’ of its pragmatic implementation.

4

Introduction

In order to set these historical connections into a context, for the 1998 German

version of this book I turned to the concept of Judenpolitik. This was a contem-

porary coinage, used by the perpetrators themselves and applied many times

before in historical research, particularly in scholarship in German. This presents

a difficulty here in that the phrases ‘Jewish policy’, or better still, ‘anti-Jewish

policy’ are inadequate as translations of Judenpolitik since the German word

Politik combines the senses of ‘politics’ and ‘policy’. This makes it very well suited

as a term to describe and analyse the complex process of the persecution of the

Jews. In my view, the concept of Judenpolitik—which will be used in German

throughout this study—comprises the following factors.

First, Judenpolitik has the sense of ‘policy’, the Nazis’ long-term intentions and

goals in respect of the Jews, their strategy for making real the utopian dream of a

racially homogeneous national community via the systematic exclusion, segrega-

tion, and elimination of the Jews.

Historical experience shows that even the most radical of political aims, pur-

sued by a determined leadership and implemented by an extensive apparatus of

power can seldom be put into practice in a simple and straightforward manner.

Political decision-making processes develop their own structures and modalities.

What this means for an analysis of the persecution of the Jews and for a study of

the Holocaust is that Nazi Judenpolitik carved out its own political territory

comparable with that of foreign policy, economic policy, and social policy, for

example. In this field of politics, whilst the top-level strategies and far-reaching

intentions of the major players were undeniably effective, they were subject to the

same sorts of friction and distraction as in other political fields or in any large

organization. These include rivalry between the protagonists (for which the

structures of the Nazi regime were particularly favourable), communication

problems between the various levels of the hierarchy, the ponderousness of the

mechanisms of power, and so forth.

Above all, however, the field of Judenpolitik did not develop autonomously or

independently, but functioned within a context determined by the other areas of