You have chosen books to help us understand the Holocaust, and your first choice is The Destruction of European Jewry, Raul Hilberg’s historical study of the Holocaust. this was first published half a century ago and is now in three volumes. can you tell me about that?
what happened is that there were previous books about the holocaust, for example by a frenchman named léon poliakov, and they were important first steps. But the real professionalization of the discipline, a tremendous shift in recognition of the importance of the Holocaust, came with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry in 1960-1.
You are reading: Famous books about the holocaust
He had great difficulty getting it published, but once it was published, people saw that it was a subject of enormous historical importance. Also, the way he carried it out: Hilberg, as a young man, had helped do some of the research for the Nuremberg trials and elsewhere. then his close knowledge of the huge collection of German documents that had been assembled for those trials changed the whole picture. And Raúl continued to work on this book for the next 50 years (he passed away just two years ago) and grew and grew until it reached the present three-volume edition.
And why did you have problems publishing it?
At the time, people didn’t seem to feel that the holocaust was a topic that had a readership, that there was a lot of interest in it. today we’re very aware, it’s a big part of public discourse and public conversation, but at the time it was a subject that was rarely talked about in public. the survivors didn’t speak up and the victimizers didn’t speak up, so there was general agreement to leave it out, both in scholarship and in general conversation.
Is there anything in the book that you would point out as especially important?
yes, your method. he was a student at the university of colombia, political science. so his method is that of a political scientist. Furthermore, more importantly, what Raúl did was to emphasize the German side of the Holocaust. he did not study the Jewish documents so closely, nor did he look at the behavior of the victims, at the resistance, or anything like that. he went straight to the documents he knew from the war trials, and concentrated on how the German state, the Nazis, organized mass murder.
He had an especially keen eye for bureaucracy and technology issues, which he thought were the deciding factors that made this a new type of felony. what was special here was the use of modern organizational techniques, of which he was a student, to carry out this mass murder.
and nobody had focused on that before?
not like he did. it mapped out how an order would start at a central location and how it would be passed on to another location, and then the order would be triggered by a third group elsewhere, and how bureaucrats were crucial in organizing the logistics, the supplies, the whole process. business logic. that was really his approach and he did it with great genius.
The second book on your list of holocaust books is The Night, a short but extremely powerful book by Elie Wiesel.
this was posted by elie wiesel and is now probably the best known memoir ever written on the death camp experience. Elie Wiesel was a young man of 14 when his small town, a mostly Jewish place called Sighet, on what was then the Romanian-Hungarian border, was invaded. It must be remembered that until 1944, Hungarian Jewry had been spared the most extreme forms of Nazi violence. but in 1944 the situation changed and the nazis essentially took over much of the organization of the jewish population in hungary. they entered his little town, the shtetl, and took him and his family away. he went to auschwitz, where his father died. but he survived the war, miraculously.
then, in the 1950s, he wrote a memoir in Yiddish. It was a very long memoir, too long, and at the time she was living in Paris. he was with some French intellectuals who told him to shorten the volume and publish a very watered down or limited version in French. him what he did, and the rest is history. it began to be widely read and continues to have a huge impact around the world. for example, a few years ago in chicago they chose it as the book of the year that everyone in every school reads. Furthermore, Oprah Winfrey recently chose her book, The New Translation, for her book club. So she would say that of all the books people read about the holocaust, besides Anne Frank’s diary, the most famous memoir is Elie Wiesel’s.
what do you think makes it so good?
I think the way the personal scenes are described, the revealing scene of his father’s death, the characters he’s able to draw and portray and this strange twilight life that people lived. All of this has enormous emotional power. and has the office; he is a novelist, and unlike many memoirs (which are all important and all have information and all shed light), this one has a literary quality. he is able to bring into the reader’s focus a deep emotional power, and also some of the mystery of what happened in the camps. there was something here that really reached the limits of human experience.
“there was something here that really pushed the limits of human experience”
See Also: Lonesome Dove Books in Order: How to read Larry McMurtry&039s series? – How To Read Me
I should add that there are other important memories. The other person who deserves to be mentioned is the great Italian novelist and memoirist Primo Levi. the primo levi books are also extraordinarily important. They are, along with Elie Wiesel’s, the most important record we have of first-person memoirs of camp survivors. like elie wiesel, primo levi has great power. It is a very scarce material, very minimalist, very, very straight, but very powerful.
Next on his list of books about the holocaust is isaiah trunk’s judenrat, about the Jewish councils in the ghettos.
There is always a discussion and emphasis in movies and in various types of public conversation about the role of the Germans: what did hitler order? why was hitler obsessed with the jews? Why did the third reich do what he did in the way of antisemitism? What was the logic of his racial policy? why did they create extermination camps, einsatzgruppen [see below] and ghettos? but the story is only partially a German story. the victims of the tragedy are the Jews and, therefore, it is crucial in the study of the holocaust to be able to see the response of the victims.
now this comes in many places and in many forms and one of the most controversial was in the ghettos. The ghettos lasted from the early 1940s, when the first ghetto was closed, until the last ghetto, the Lodz ghetto, was dismantled in August 1944. And there were hundreds of ghettos spread across Europe. so for five years, millions of Jews lived and died in these enclosed spaces and, to some degree, had the ability to control aspects of their lives. the Germans gave an order, a work order, food requirements, health issues, deportations, whatever, and it was the Jews themselves who had to pass these orders and largely implement them. now the people who were in power to do that were the members of the Jewish councils. one of the first things the Nazis did when they established a ghetto was to establish a Jewish council: the big ghettos had bigger councils, the small ghettos had councils too. The Nazis directly appointed the leaders of the ghetto councils and were the crucial mediators between the German overlord, German politics, and the Jewish people.
Now, after the war, there was a tremendous debate about their role, about how they acted, about the morality of some of them, about the fate of many of them. It became especially hot during the Eichmann trial in Israel in the early 1960s, when Hannah Arendt published the Eichmann book in Jerusalem, which is still widely read and well known. he essentially accused them of being collaborators and said if there had been no Jewish councils, if there had been no Jewish leadership, more Jews would have survived, there would have been less mass murder. so this topic is at the very center of the study of the holocaust. and isaiah trunk, who is a survivor, undertook this study of the various councils and investigated the issue of collaboration and cowardice, heroism, support for resistance, or lack of support. and his book has become one of the great classics of Jewish literature on the holocaust.
and what concludes?
The bottom line is that the councils had very, very limited influence, very limited autonomy or freedom in the first place. second, especially early on, they were largely unaware of what was going on: the Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to try to mislead them and keep them ignorant of the genocidal plan that had been formulated. thirdly, that even if the councils did not exist, there would have been no difference. there were people on the council who saved their own lives, who tried to exploit the situation, who weren’t always moral role models. but the end result of evaluating this behavior is that it really didn’t make any difference. the Nazis were so determined, so obsessed with ridding the world of the Jews, of committing genocide, that the policies and practices of the Jewish councils were not a major factor in the outcome. So it is a very important book. If people want to know about the Jewish side of the tragedy, this is a must-read book.
let’s move on to the next book on your holocaust book list, which is ordinary men: the 101st reserve police battalion and the final solution in poland. presumably, this book addresses the question of how ordinary people came to commit such atrocities.
this was a book written by christopher browning, who now teaches at the university of north carolina. chris found a collection of documents that were testimonies given in a trial of a group of german police officers and talk about his role in the murder of eastern european jews. you have to know that with the invasion of russia, in the summer of 1941, the nazis organized a new form of violence, and called them einsatzgruppen. there were four groups of men. they were not volunteers, they were assigned to these units. the largest group was a thousand men and there were three slightly smaller units, a total of 3,000 men. and his orders were very simple: go right behind the wehrmacht [the german army], while the russians retreated and the nazi army advanced.
They were to go first to the big cities and then to the smaller communities, round up all the Jews and kill them. Initially, the order appears to have been for Jewish men, but very shortly thereafter, on the direct order of Heinrich Himmler, it turned to the murder of women and children as well. these groups literally went from town to town, rounded up the Jews and shot them or put them in the synagogue and set it on fire. or, for example, like they did in vilnius in lithuania, they marched them out of the city, into the wooded areas, they made them dig big trenches, they lined them up, they shot them, then the next group had to go in, get shot, lay down in the first group, and you will slowly have a pyramiding effect of bodies on bodies. then it would be covered. so this murder, which claimed around one and a half million lives over 18 months, was carried out mainly by these four groups. but they were not alone. they had help, both from the wehrmacht (although the army would deny this for many years) and from various police battalions. there were local police battalions – Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc. but other battalions came from germany, what was called “order police”.
so this group that chris browning wrote about was the 101st order police battalion. and they describe the extraordinary behavior they participated in. now the reason this is such an important book and raises profound questions is that when you study the holocaust you ask yourself almost immediately: how could people do this? how could men who had children of their own go out and kill other children? how could men who are fathers take children and smash their heads against the wall? Or do the husbands take the women and open their wombs and kill their children and shoot them behind the ear? So Browning’s book posed that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on first-hand testimony. it also tries to offer a series of explanations of human behavior that are more controversial. The history of this battalion was later taken up by Daniel Goldhagen, who wrote the book that caused quite a stir, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. That was probably the biggest stir in holocaust publications since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
And what did he argue?
goldhagen accused the Germans, specifically, of possessing what he called an eliminationist anti-Semitism at the very heart of their character, their culture, their society. and that of course raised questions of collective guilt and, also, is there such a thing as a national identity? It sparked enormous controversy in Germany and elsewhere. so the two books together, which took the same set of documents as central evidence, are a vital part of the current debate about the holocaust, about the behavior of the killers.
And what explanations does Browning offer that you agree with?
browning goes through different explanations and I agree with a lot of things and I disagree with a lot of things. there is the old explanation that people just follow orders. Several experiments have been done since World War II, most notably by a man named Stanley Milgram at Yale, where he experiments on his students to see how far they will go just to get an A in a class. and then there are various debates by social scientists and others about the brutalization of people in times of war, how values change.
and then there are those who emphasize the force of indoctrination and antisemitism: that’s goldhagen’s explanation. Browning himself made much of the issue of peer pressure. people in these groups were given the opportunity to leave and not participate. but hardly anyone did, because they were afraid of being called cowards and losing the respect of other people in the group. browning gives special importance to that psychological element, that people are very conformist, they are very afraid of leaving and that they say no to the group. Goldhagen found that explanation too lukewarm for a crime like this and focused on the profound importance of ideology. so these are the debates that have been going on and i think ideology was probably more important than christopher browning gives it credit for.
People are capable of horrible things. Look at the Rwandan genocide.
See Also: Maximum Ride books in order ▷ This is the only way to read this series!
You don’t have to wait for the rwanda genocide. Already 200 years ago Hegel referred to human history as a slaughterhouse. we have had mass crime and violence and slaughter of innocents since the time of cain and abel. what is special about the holocaust is not that there is violence and murder, but that the core is an ideological drive to achieve the complete extinction of an entire people. that seems to me to be the central and unique ideological element of the holocaust.
“what is special about the holocaust is that the core is an ideological impulse to achieve the complete extinction of an entire people”
so you have to kill all jewish children, you have to kill all jewish women who can give birth to jewish children, you have to ban all women from getting pregnant and if they are, you have to kill them . if by some miracle they give birth, you have to kill the baby immediately. that’s something you can’t find anywhere else.
the last of your books on the holocaust are notes from the warsaw ghetto by emmanuel ringelblum.
again, this is a way to access the Jewish side of the tragedy. There was an organization started in the Warsaw ghetto by a great man named Emmanuel Ringelblum. Ringelblum had been a historian before the war, and when the war started he had a stroke of genius, tragic genius. he organized a team of people to go out and save whatever material they could find on ghetto life. he also commissioned some of his colleagues to go out and investigate topics that might be important to future generations: for example, how did Jewish children behave in the ghetto? How did Jewish women behave in the ghetto? what was the self-help operation in the ghetto? what happened to the orphans? what was the food supply like? how was it distributed? what about religious services? what about traditional religious communities, rabbis and students?
Their group was called the oneg shabbat group, because they met on the Sabbath and collected huge amounts of material, because they were anxious for the world to have information that the Nazis would not give them. they did not want the Nazi voice to be the only voice on the ghetto; they wanted the Jewish voice to be heard. so they collected this stuff and near the end of the war, when it was clear that the warsaw ghetto was going to go up in smoke as a result of the easter uprising in ’43, they put it in big metal milk cans and buried it to them. after the war, they found most of these cans, not all of them. So the most important source of information about wartime Jewish behavior in the ghettos comes to us from these Warsaw ghetto notes by Ringelblum and his team. the oneg shabbat records are absolutely the most essential Jewish documents we have from the holocaust.
and ringelblum was executed?
he survived for a while after the warsaw uprising, but yes, he was killed during the war.
Is there a personal element to what you write?
try not to. he certainly has his point of view. he’s critical of certain types of Jewish behavior, he’s critical of certain actions, but the idea was really to be an objective chronicler of the ghetto, and he tries very hard to do that, not to let his own emotions get in the way. although, of course, in the situation in which he and the Jewish people found themselves, it was impossible to separate the trials entirely. then you get some very critical judgments about the Jewish council, about the Jewish police in the ghetto and some of the other people that are in leadership roles. but, in general, the importance of the collection, of the material, is this good faith effort to collect material and provide future generations with a record of what was happening, on a daily basis, in the besieged Jewish communities.
holocaust studies is your field. in july 2009 there was an article in the new york book review, “holocaust: the ignored reality” by timothy snyder, arguing that there has been too much focus, when it comes to the holocaust, on the jews of western europe, when most part of the murder was of eastern european jews. Was it an important article?
It was an important article, but it was nothing new. made it sound as if he had discovered the wheel. the fact is that scholars know that the center of the holocaust was not in western europe, but in eastern europe: in poland and the baltic states, ukraine, the borders of russia, romania, and finally hungary. that was the great central jewish community of europe, and there the great ghettos existed and there the politics of the einsatzgruppen were developed, with the invasion of russia. Finally, the six extermination camps (camps that were established specifically for the production of corpses) were all in Poland. so they brought people to poland from other places, and they put them in poland because poland was at the center of jewish life. there were 3.3 million jews in poland before the war, there were another four to five million jews on the fringes of the settlements, the westernmost part of the soviet union. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Baltic states, there were almost 800,000 in Hungary, three-quarters of a million in Romania.
so it’s no surprise that if you’re going to kill the jews of europe, you’re going to do it in central and eastern europe, and the nazis knew it and they did it. So the emphasis in that article is correct: just the outsiders, the people who don’t really know all the details, who get their information from Hollywood, who concentrate on Western Europe. but scholars knew that eastern europe was the center of the storm and that’s why hilberg for example concentrates so much on polish activity, the role of the german state in poland, that’s why the jewish council book by trunk is mainly about the polish ghettos, browning’s book is about the war on the eastern front with the invasion of russia, etc.
Regarding the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis, is there a consensus on this?
himmler himself had come up with a number through various methods when he wanted to find out what he had achieved, and it was six million. and that became a kind of canonical number in nuremberg and after. there are different totals that have been offered by scholars who have re-studyed death camp records, einsatzgruppen records, etc. all numbers fall somewhere in the range of five to six million. that’s the overwhelming consensus, and no one who isn’t a holocaust denier has a problem finding that there were at least 5.1, 5.2 million, up to 6 million, 6.2 million deaths when you add up all the various places where people died in the records we have. .
and that includes eastern europe where we don’t know as much about what happened?
includes Eastern Europe. For example, of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland, after the war, 92-93 percent were dead. in vilnius and riga and other parts of those baltic states you have a mortality rate of 96 percent, the highest anywhere. we have a lot of evidence: the nuremberg tribunal did a pretty thorough job of collecting documentation, the russians collected documentation, and the germans themselves kept many documents that were seized. so we have a pretty good idea of where and how this was done. is not exact, there are still things to learn and important information to discover, but the general scheme, especially the numerical and demographic scheme, is quite clear.
See Also: Shapes Books for Little Learners – Pocket of Preschool