The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. - book reviews

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Berel Lang

In a second objection, Hilberg criticizes the equation of his own views with Arendt's charge of collaboration on the part of the Judenrate (Jewish Councils) in the ghettoes. The problem, according to Hilberg, goes deeper than this, since the response of the Councils was only a symptom of general patterns of "alleviation" and "anticipatory compliance" that had over centuries become ingrained in the Jewish communities of Europe. It was the "time-honored Jewish reaction to danger" that explains the Jewish failure to recognize the Nazi threat and the inability to oppose it when they did. "I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws, and contracts," he now writes about this position. "Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance" (pp. 126-127).

This is, if anything, a harsher formulation than the earlier one in the Destruction. Indeed, it comes partly as a response to critics of those earlier statements, whose objections Hilberg now takes as confirmation of his own thesis; they evidently found it - as Franz Neumann predicted - "too much to take." (In these terms, Hilberg wins the argument whether his readers agree with him or not.) And certainly, whatever perspective it is viewed from, this one among Hilberg's claims/shard to take. But is it only this which explains the criticism that has been directed against it? For a genuine historical question is at issue here as well even if one agrees with Hilberg that Jewish resistance was minimal - the question of why that was the case, and what other options were realistically available, as a matter not only of psychology but of history. Elsewhere in his autobiography, Hilberg describes the care he took with the language of the Destruction: he did not use the term "murder" because it was "accusatory"; he would not employ "exculpatory" terms like "execution" since this made the "victims into delinquents" - nor "extermination" since this "likened [the victims] to vermin" (pp. 87-88). Yet he does not consider even now that the supposed connection between European Jewish history and the lack of Jewish resistance might also warrant a subtler, more complex referent than the "Jewish" factor to which he attributes it. Was it so obviously a Jewish calculation (and aside from that, so obviously delusional) to believe that in the end even the Nazis would act out of self-interest? The fact that the Nazis did not do so was a lesson learned from and after the Holocaust - not one that was evident beforehand, and certainly not self-evident.

Perhaps all historical explanation remains inadequate to what it hopes or claims to explain, but what is omitted here is noteworthy. For Hilberg's conclusion presupposes a two-fold comparative analysis that never appears: between the reaction of Jews and of other groups to the Nazi threat, and between the reaction of the Jews to the Nazis and of other groups to other extreme situations. The absence of such comparisons is especially serious because of the counter-evidence that seems indicated or at least suggested in them. So, for example, as Hilberg himself has noted, upward of 2,000,000 Russian prisoners-of-war were killed by the Nazis. These were men fit enough to have served as soldiers and were often held captive on or near native ground (neither of these advantages applied to the majority of Jewish "captives"). Yet the Russian P.O.W.s died anyway, and without notable evidence of uprisings or resistance. Did also a Russian strategy of submission or accommodation account for this destruction? Or again - in an earlier and presumably easier age - was an analogous French strategy responsible for causing the masses of people purged in the aftermath of the Revolution to submit passively?