Rethinking the Holocaust
In the New York Review of Books, Timothy Snyder argues that we have misunderstood the Holocaust by placing so much emphasis on Auschwitz.
The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.
This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.
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Santomauro is a Holocaust denier--referring to it as a “legend” indeed. Snyder does not suggest that there was no gassing with Zyklon B at Auschwitz when he refers to gassing with carbon monoxide in the earlier gas vans and gas chambers, but Santomauro tries to twist it that way. And of course he misrepresents his book--suggesting it is produced by Amazon rather than just sold there. The term scum of the earth comes to mind.
Perhaps Santomauro is a member of the flat earth society as well? Those who were murdered (6 million) and their descendants are not available to refute any denials. Please, go to Iran and join Ahamandijad.
The best reason for playing down Auschwitz is that the official account of “industrialized mass murder” there is so forensically flimsy, confused and contradictory.
Not one authentic photograph or film of gas chambers in action, not one German document or decoded intercept unambiguously referring to them being used other than for fumigation, ceaseless rethinking among “respectable” historians about when, whereabouts and how many died that way… no amount of last-ditch lawmaking can prevent this argument breaking out time and again.
In 1946 it was deposed at the Nuremberg trials that 4m people were killed at Auschwitz. The official, keep-you-out-of-jail figure gradually came down to 1.6m, then 1.1m, and latterly a German researcher has counted under 500,000 without being hauled into court. So did the late Jean-Claude Pressac. Employed by a French Jewish foundation to refute the objections of those pesky revisionists or “deniers”, he ended up more than half agreeing with them and saying that there was no categorical, final proof of mass gassing, only “criminal traces”,
Moreover, because Asia carries no baggage about the Shoah, its young historians will be able to look at this tangle of atrocity stories and garbled rumours with a cold eye. The Auschwitz-Birkenau killing-machine narrative originated among those fearless defenders of truth, the propaganda department of the Red Army. It is time we stopped being intimidated by it and the layers of pseudo-pious kitsch that surround it.
And as for Treblinka…Read DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look at Both Sides by Thomas Dalton.
For serious scholars of the Nazi years and Holocaust, the murderous activities of the Einsatzgrupen are well documented. Auschwitz is a"brick and mortar” museum of the horror. Some of the grasss covered pits of Eastern Jewish victims have been found. The total number may never be found. For an excellent discussion of interviews with the murderers read,ORDINARY MEN by Christopher Browning.
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Joshua Pines
07/06/09 12:13 PM
It’s a valid point but he falls short. Hungary presents perhaps the best microcosm as those from Budapest were more similar to their Western European counterparts and those from outer villages (in all directions, though obviously more famously to the northeast, including what was then Romania but had been Hungary before Trianon) had more in common with Holocaust victims from Poland and the USSR.
Snyder’s cursory reference to Hungarian/Romanian victims misses this point.