New York Newsday

August 23, 1989

Diluting Responsibility For the Final Solution

Review of In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past, by Richard J. Evans. Pantheon, 196 pp., $18.95.

Describing the end of the terrifying war that started just 50 years ago, the German novelist Heinrich Boll wrote, in his moving letter to his sons, that they would always be able to tell everything they needed to know about a fellow German by applying one simple question. Did the person refer to the events of April, 1945, as the "defeat" or the "liberation" of Germany?
           In recent years, this pointed question has been asked, in sharply contrasting ways, by a new school of West German historians. Seeking to rid themselves of the burden of guilt and of the related burden of international distrust, they have an ingenious revisionist project designed to appeal to racist and anti-Communist tendencies that are latent elsewhere in the West. In Germany, at any rate, they have met with success on a scale that would have been difficult to imagine as little as 10 years ago.
           Ten years ago, the dominant image in German life was still that incredible photograph of Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees before the monument to the massacred Jews of Poland. Today a combination of cunning, self-pity and amnesia has substituted the picture of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, smirking proudly as then-President Ronald Reagan discovered that the soldiers of the SS were "victims" too.
           The most eminent of the German revisionists is Ernest Nolte, whose book "Three Faces of Fascism" was something of a classic when it was published in the 1960s. Nolte's writing helped challenge the simplistic usage of the word "totalitarian," a term that lumped all forms of modern despotism under one heading. Today, however, Nolte argues a highly debased version of the thesis he once attacked.
           In his view, Nazism was simply a defensive reaction to Communism in Russia. Its particularly horrific features — genocide and enslavement — are not so much denied or minimized as excused, as a response to the Gulag Archipelago and Soviet expansionism. The usefulness of this to the German right is obvious. It lessens the historical blame for the Final Solution by making it a matter of relativism. It helps keep alive the spirit of the Cold War. And it avoids the question of responsibility of the German military and business elite, who at least tolerated Hitler until almost the very end of the war and who now choose to speak of the Nazi period as a terrible "aberration."
           As Richard Evans argues, in his cool and incisive account, there is at least one major objection to this self-serving thesis. In his own speeches and writings, especially in "Mein Kampf." Adolf Hitler did not employ the excuses that are now being made for him. He openly proclaimed that he had become a violent anti-Socialist and anti-Semite before World War I. In other words, his intense hatred for what the Nazi machine called "Judeo-Bolshevism" was not the result of any excesses committed by the Soviet revolution. (Indeed, it was the White Russian emigres who brought the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with them.) And the idea of a "Final Solution" to the Jewish question was in Hitler's disordered mind well before and revelations about the Gulag.
           The second attempt to rehabilitate the Third Reich takes the form of an argument that the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was basically defensive or pre-emptive. Hitler struck before Stalin could. Again, this thesis collapses upon examination and shows itself unhistoric. The very reason for the astounding early success of the Nazi invasion was the utter unpreparedness of the Soviet army, which has been attested by a host of military and diplomatic historians. Ironically, the Gulag does play a part here, since Stalin had been conducting a paranoid purge of his most able generals to forestall any move against his own absolute rule.
           Finally, the revisionists argue that the Germans were right to fight to the end in 1945, because they were defending ancient values and traditions in the East, and were protecting historic German populations against the incursion of Asian barbarism. This defense hardly survives the opening of Auschwitz and its revelation of the way in which anti-Slavic as well as anti-Semitic "civilization" was being upheld. But what it does do is keep alive old German rightist claims to lost territory in the land that is now Poland. The new school of scholars is being opportunist and euphemistic about the past in order to be ambitious about the present, and perhaps the future.
           This book is a well-argued and intelligent guide, not only to a debate that can never end, but to the increasingly vital discussions that are being stimulated by the revival of the issue of German reunification. The uniting of Germany will not occur if people suspect that there are Germans who don't understand why it was divided in the first place.