Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYthe listing of the other extermination camps either, and which was infact described only by a number of historical researches into detailssuch as the books by Sandkühler and Gerlach 1 – although there was nodearth of knowledge about the basic facts and notions following thedisclosure of the reports by the SS Generals Stahlecker and Katzmannduring the Nuremberg trials.Even if one could speak, with a grain of salt, about a “victory of therevisionists,” a recently discovered SS document pointed in a differentdirection, which rated the capacity of the five crematories in theAuschwitz main camp and in Birkenau at a total of almost 5,000 incinerationsper day. Even if one did not simply reject the revisionist objectionsof document criticism, 2 a basic fact which was visible right fromthe start would still remain, if one accepts the division by four as suggestedby Pressac: even on the background of the expectably many victimsof epidemics, there was no need for the four huge crematories inBirkenau in order to cremate the “natural” corpses. This basic “antirevisionist”fact corresponds to the extraordinary extension of memorialsand commemoration events surrounding the “final solution” after theTurnaround [German reunification in 1990] and also the tightening ofthe article 130 German Penal Code on “inciting the masses,” whichraises the question, though, whether this tightening and the entire articleare reconcilable with the Basic Law’s guarantees of freedom.{p. 3} I will now briefly contemplate three fairly well-known booksof the “established line” which have appeared during the past decadeand which emphasize how little the question of the “final solution” canbe exhausted by references to legally definable details.Most controversial but all in all positively received by the Germanpublic was the book by Daniel Goldhagen about Hitlers willige Vollstrecker(Hitler’s Willing Executioners). There one can read: it is almostalways claimed that the killing of millions of Jews would havebeen impossible without the “gas chambers” due to their capacity,“which has been exaggerated, though.” 3 In the framework of Goldhagen’soverall concept, which pronounces “the Germans” and their“eliminatory anti-Semitism” guilty instead of “the National Socialists”or “the SS” or even “Hitler,” this is a natural claim, as the perception ofan extermination in gas chambers allows the number of “perpetrators”to appear small and to underscore the role of the Jewish forced helpers.Yet within the common notion strongly focused on the ”gas chambers,”this allegation no doubt amounts to a “downplaying of the Holocaust”287