How Not to Write a History of the Holocaust

What more can be said about the Holocaust? What new finding or interpretations can be offered after decades of intensive research and thinking? As the distance from the event grows, new interpretations inevitably emerge. All history is contemporary history, noted the Italian historian Benedetto Croce: We view the past from the perspective of the present.

In the past couple of decades, Holocaust historiography has expanded tremendously. For a long time, historians of the subject were more or less neatly divided between those who examined the German viewpoint, and were therefore interested mostly in the perpetrators, and those who wrote on the Jewish experience, and thus largely about the victims. We tend to forget that until the 1980s the Holocaust was taught mostly either as part of Jewish history or as one element, and hardly the most important, of the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. Particularly since the opening of East European and Russian archives following the collapse of Communism, but also as a result of the simultaneous emergence of genocide studies, the historiography of the Holocaust has entered into the mainstream of historical scholarship.

In recent years, even traditional historians of the event have introduced strikingly new methodologies and interpretations. Thus Saul Friedländer’s magnum opus, Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997), seeks to provide an “integrated history” that includes the voices of both perpetrators and victims. Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival has shifted from previous analyses of perpetrator motivation to using victim testimonies as historical documents. And Peter Longerich’s deeply researched Holocaust has proposed a complex and comprehensive understanding of how Nazi Judenpolitik (Jewish policies and politics) incrementally evolved into a continent-wide program of genocide.

Those works have taken us forward in several ways. Methodologically, Friedländer has shown that a “total history” of the Holocaust can and must bring together the polarized perspectives of Germans and Jews. Conceptually, Browning has forcefully argued that despite earlier suspicions that victim testimonies are subjective and unreliable, they can and must be used in order to reconstruct events that would otherwise never become part of the historical record. Historiographically, Longerich has reconfigured the old debate between the “intentionalists,” who insisted that Hitler had premeditated Auschwitz and was the prime mover of the Holocaust, and the “functionalists,” who argued that the “final solution” was the outcome of interagency rivalries in the Third Reich and a “cumulative radicalization” of policy, resulting from competition for Hitler’s favor. Longerich has shown that anti-Jewish policies served instead as the glue of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) from the very beginning of the regime, and that rather than a single moment of decision to conduct mass murder, the transition from genocidal rhetoric to extermination was inherent in Germany’s goal of transforming the demographic realities in the occupied eastern territories.

The Holocaust has also always attracted popular and sensationalist histories. There is something intoxicating in the wholesale nihilism of the Third Reich, what Susan Sontag called “fascinating fascism.” It still sells. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon can be found in films, ranging from controversial early works like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) and Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties (1975) to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004) and, not least, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009).

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder thinks there is plenty more to say about the Holocaust; indeed, as he argues in a recent book, previous scholarship — to which he pays only fleeting attention — got the story substantially wrong. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015) sets out to correct both the record of Holocaust history and the moral and political lessons it presents to us today. This is an ambitious agenda, not least because it simultaneously weaves in a set of old historical and ideological ideas that, while never explicitly stated, constitute the underlying premise of the entire undertaking. These include the idea that the Holocaust was largely Hitler’s personal obsession rather than a larger German or European project; that its conceptualization and implementation can be traced back to Bolshevik ideas and Soviet policies; and that the mass collaboration in the murder of the Jews by their Eastern European neighbors resulted largely from the latter’s own oppression by the Soviets and was, in any case, a mere sideshow. (Snyder is also the author of the 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.)

One can only admire Snyder’s ambition. Putting together analyses of Nazi ideology, Polish politics, Soviet occupation, German and other states’ genocidal practices, and Zionist responses, and then reinterpreting this entire body of research not merely as a new history but also as a morality tale and a warning, is no mean feat. Unfortunately, Black Earth collapses under the sheer weight of his ambitions.

Because Snyder ranges so widely, few critics have discussed the book as a whole. In The New York Review of Books, Browning disagreed with Snyder’s view — borrowed from the German historian Christian Gerlach — of the timing of the decision to enact the “final solution.”

Other critics have focused on the book’s presentation of Polish-Zionist collaboration. Citing Snyder’s claim that “the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine,” Gil Rubin, writing in Tablet, questions “why Poland — if it indeed was committed to creating a Jewish state — would lay its bet on the Zionist Revisionist movement, a rather small and politically weak group within the Jewish world of the 1930s, and on a fantasy of an armed rebellion against the British Empire.” Historians have interpreted the “seemingly fantastical aspect of the alliance”; it was not so much a concrete political plan, but rather a “propaganda ploy designed to serve Polish domestic and foreign political needs.” Rubin therefore concludes that “Snyder simply reproduces the propagandistic rhetoric the Polish government sought to promote in the late 1930s.” Finally, reflecting the perplexed response by many other critics to the book’s argument that environmental catastrophe may recreate the conditions the brought about the rise of Hitler, Mark Mazower opined in the Financial Times that since Snyder’s “real concern is the future,” he has written “a philosophical history that burrows past individual events to get at underlying truths and ends up convincing neither as history nor as exhortation.”

The benefit of writing big histories with overarching themes and strong assertions is their appeal to a larger public, and their relative immunity from general criticism by scholars wary of venturing beyond their specific expertise. The peril of such histories is that they indulge in simplification and generalization. When they are also driven by a barely concealed ideological agenda — first, that Poland was the main bulwark against and victim of both the Nazis and the Soviets; second, that Polish anti-Semitism had nothing in common with the Nazi extermination of the Jews; and third, that Polish resistance to German occupation trumps Polish collaboration in the murder of their Jewish fellow citizens — we should pay attention, especially when such arguments touch on the worst crime against humanity in modern times.

Snyder offers several loosely connected theses. He sets out with a classical “intentionalist” interpretation of Hitler’s worldview, much of which can be found in the works of Eberhard Jäckel four decades ago. Hitler saw the history of humanity as an eternal struggle between races; in order to prevail, the Aryan race needed living space, to be found in the east; the Jews were a parasitical anti-race that had to be wiped out. As any number of German historians have noted since the 1980s, in implementing this policy Hitler set out on a war of extermination in which Jews were to be destroyed (initially by deportation and later by mass murder), Slavs were to be decimated and enslaved, and Aryan Germans were to create settler colonies where ever more healthy children would be produced for the unending racial struggle. This empire would also ensure Germany of sufficient food and raw materials in a world of scarce resources. As Mazower has pointed out, this was both a traditional colonial vision and a ruthlessly genocidal plan, in which race and space superseded political order and shared human values.

Having set up this “intentionalist” interpretation, Snyder abandons it and moves on to his thesis about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. While conceding that 1930s Poland was increasingly anti-Semitic, he argues that unlike Nazi Germany, Poland was also an ardent promoter of Zionism. What better way, after all, to solve Poland’s “Jewish Question” than by shipping off its three million Jewish citizens, a tenth of the country’s population, to a Jewish state in Palestine? To be sure, this was entirely unrealistic, since Britain, which happened to be Poland’s ally, had no intention of allowing this. Nor does this pro-Zionist anti-Semitism differ much from Nazi Germany’s “Haavara” (transfer) agreement with the leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish residents of pre-state Palestine), which actually brought some 40,000 German Jews to Palestine despite Hitler’s genocidal intentions. In the 1930s, both Germany and Poland pursued policies of making life unbearable for their Jewish citizens and seeking ways to encourage them to leave. But in Snyder’s view, Polish-Jewish collaboration was of an entirely different character.

As an example of this collaboration, he picks Avraham Stern, commander of what the British named the Stern Gang. From Snyder’s account, one gains the impression that Stern represented an important segment of Zionist activism in the Yishuv. A more accurate contemporary assessment was provided in the February 13, 1943, issue of Davar, a widely read newspaper in Jewish Palestine at the time: “Avraham Stern, the leader of a gang that recently engaged in acts of robbery and murder, and whose men caused the tragic death of three [Jewish police] officers in Tel Aviv, was killed yesterday at 11:45 in an engagement with the police.” Stern had recruited “youths with criminal inclinations,” while “the few adults who joined him could not share the authority and their little group underwent endless splits.” Consequently, Davar had only words of praise for the “energetic actions taken by the [British] police and the Yishuv against these criminals.” So much for the Yishuv’s view of anti-Semitic Zionism and its promoters.

Snyder’s focus on Poland provides the basis for his next two theses. First, he argues that the total destruction of states enabled the killings of the highest proportions of their Jews. Second, he proposes that the killing of Jews was even more complete in areas subjected to “double occupation,” especially the territories of interwar eastern Poland, occupied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 and by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944. The first of these theses seems tautological. As historians pointed out long ago, clearly it was much easier for the Germans to murder Jews in areas that were under their direct control than in countries that could pursue a modicum of independence. Eichmann could arrange for the murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews when he arrived in Budapest with the Wehrmacht in spring 1944. Bulgaria, Romania, or, for that matter France, could deliver or refuse to deliver Jews, or kill them themselves, in accordance with their perceived national interests.

Snyder’s insistence on the obvious — that destruction of a state facilitates genocide — becomes more understandable when we look at Poland. If interwar Polish anti-Semitism was essentially Zionist, then wartime Polish collaboration in the extermination of the Jews, and expressions of satisfaction about the solution of the “Jewish Question” there — despite vehement opposition to German rule — can be presented as the outcome of state collapse rather than a reflection of popular attitudes in Poland predating the war. Here Snyder’s idea of “double occupation” is applied to reinforce the idea of state collapse. Examined from the perspective of contemporary discourse in much of post-Communist Eastern Europe, one cannot avoid seeing the link of this idea to the popular “double genocide” theory. According to this theory, while the Germans murdered the Jews (with some help from local “bad apples”), the Soviets, closely associated in people’s minds with the Jews, murdered the “indigenous” population.

“Double genocide” is nothing but a rehashing of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, the canard that Communism and the Soviet Union were a Jewish project, which was used to justify the killing of Jews during the war. And while Snyder rightly dismisses the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism as a Nazi myth, he also embraces the idea that the rapid mass killing of Jews by the Germans in areas previously occupied by the Soviets was largely the result of Soviet policies such as mass deportation and the murder of real and imagined opponents. In other words, Snyder repeatedly suggests that the Soviets bear a major responsibility for the Holocaust (and he says nothing about the fact that the killing was ended only by the costly victory of the Red Army over the Wehrmacht).

It is certainly true that the Soviet occupation both decapitated the elites and brutalized the population. But this does not explain the engagement of local nationalists in Nazi-organized mass killings as well as independent ethnic violence. Snyder argues again and again that Nazi collaborators were, in fact, former Soviet collaborators trying to endear themselves to the new rulers. But while there were surely some such people (we are given no figures), there is little doubt that the vast majority of Nazi collaborators and other purveyors of ethnic violence came from nationalist organizations created before the war, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which left a trail of Polish and Jewish blood in Volhynia and Galicia (formerly eastern Poland). The ideology and motivation of the OUN had little to do with the “double occupation,” and much to do with violent Polish suppression of Ukrainian nationalism, as well as with intense anti-Semitism expressed long before the war.

Snyder’s arguments about Polish Zionist anti-Semitism, state collapse, and double occupation constitute the Polish narrative of the Holocaust. As a result, Black Earth is neither new nor original, apart from the fact that it is told in English and presented as a reinterpretation of the Holocaust as a whole.

Snyder’s presentation is complemented by yet another thesis, this one on the nature of rescue. As he sees it, when states collapse, the only barrier to barbarism is individual altruism. Such acts are rare and have no bearing on the general course of events — yet are nevertheless to be admired as flashes of humanity on the dark canvas of the past. Snyder cites many examples, most of which concern Poles saving Jews. The trouble with this account is not only that it transforms the exceptional into the heart of the matter, but also that it evades the two most important experiences of Jews in much of Eastern Europe. The first is the reality of pervasive betrayal. Any reader of diaries and accounts by survivors will be struck by the fact that Jews escaping the Germans found themselves in an overwhelmingly hostile environment. The most common responses by neighbors and strangers were indifference, plunder, physical and sexual abuse, humiliation, denunciation, and murder. The second is that while almost all Jews who survived were helped by gentiles, more often than not the rescues entailed bribery and exploitation, as well as promises (not always fulfilled) of material gain after the war. Indeed, common rescuers were far more conventional, and far less saintly, than they appear in Snyder’s depiction.

Throughout these chapters, Snyder makes no mention of his initial “intentionalist” thesis. The reason is that a Polish history of the Holocaust has no need of that thesis, since such a narrative can take for granted that Hitler wanted to destroy the states of Eastern Europe, murder the Jews, and colonize the Aryan race’s living space. To be sure, Hitler’s destructive will is an important premise, since it relegates the desire of such countries as Poland to be rid of their Jews to a far less lethal category. But in the concluding chapter, Snyder finally returns, if somewhat obliquely, to his early thesis.

Curiously, what he appears to argue is that Hitler’s worldview was rooted in a fear of environmental catastrophe, and that since global warming currently threatens to bring about precisely that kind of catastrophe, we must beware of another Holocaust. This defies logic. Hitler fantasized a world in which scarce resources would all be directed to the needs of the Aryan race. Global warming may well create growing strife over scarce resources, but do we need a history of the Holocaust to tell us that global warming is potentially catastrophic? Is Snyder’s “warning” an attempt to tell us that Hitler’s environmental catastrophism had a kernel of truth? Or is he saying that floods and droughts may bring about another Hitler, another Holocaust? Either way, the attempt to link the Holocaust to concerns about climate change appears at best facile and at worst misleading. It reads a little like the flip side of the gun lobby’s bizarre assertion that had Germany had less restrictive gun-control laws in the 1930s, Jews might have been able to defend themselves. Historians, at least, should not rely on public ignorance of the past in order to mobilize it for present political agendas, whether one agrees with them or not.

The true warning at the heart of Black Earth is the peril of writing a big history from a single point of view: attempting to fit everything through such a narrow prism is bound to end up distorting the whole. By their nature, historical events are complex and multifaceted; it is the task of the historian to find the right balance between fair and judicious reconstruction of a past event and an interpretation that brings in his or her understanding of the significance and meaning of that event. No past events have only one meaning: Attaching a particular meaning to the past and waving it in front of our eyes as a warning is an ideological, not a historical, endeavor.

Written with flair, imagination, and rare confidence on a topic that has baffled so many, Black Earth is a good example of how not to write a history of the Holocaust.

Omer Bartov is a professor of European history at Brown University and the author of The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town (Simon & Schuster, to be published in September 2017).