Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYeven arrived at the theses that a hardly misunderstandable prefigurationof the final solution can be found in the earliest and most important ofall “talks with Hitler,” namely the writing by Hitler’s mentor DietrichEckart Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin [Bolshevism from Mosesto Lenin], which I had rediscovered. 4 The philosophical sense of thismy first book becomes perhaps especially apparent on p. 512, and rightthere the final solution is once more mentioned: within this philosophicalperspective Hitler does no longer appear as a mere epochal figure,but rather as the end of an eon: “But this qualification denotes nothingless than a heroization. Instead, it restores the highest of all honors tothe millions of his victims: it highlights that they, who have been exterminatedas vermin, did not die as the unfortunate objects of a repulsivecrime but as representatives during the most desperate attack everlead against the human being and the transcendence in it.”Not just due to its terminology were expressions like this not commonduring the early sixties, and an Israeli historian proffered good reasons,when writing in a study published by the Historische Zeitschrift in1985 {p. 4}, that I was the first German historian who had emphasizedthe central importance of the “final solution” for an appropriate understandingof National Socialism. 5 Hence the claim could be advocatedthat I was a co-founder of the “orthodox” and at once of the “intentionalistic”interpretation in 1963, that is to say of the interpretation whichconsiders a decision by Hitler as the principal cause for the final solution.I want to stress here with emphasis that I never made a volte-face.Even after having taken note of the doubts expressed by the revisionistsand after I had to admit to myself that I myself had no adequate answersfor some of them, I am still convinced that the statements by RudolfHöss and even those by Kurt Gerstein are correct in their core. I stillmaintain that something like that can neither be invented nor forced 6 –maybe one can imagine that Höss and Gerstein were haunted by feverishdreams in their prison cells, but both statements are independentfrom each other, and the one by Gerstein was confirmed in its main featuresby his companion, the Marburg Professor Pfannenstiel. Numerousother testimonies by SS men and victims point in the same direction,and even strong contradictions in these statements would not touch thecore: it is conceivable that the statements by victims of a severe earthquakein a remote area diverge in details, and yet they would be correcton the whole and would prove the factuality of the event. I therefore264