The Historiography of the Holocaust

208 Jürgen Matthäus
compliance from society at large. And third, following the ‘Holocaust’ TV series
of the late 1970s and more so after Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the murder
of the Jews had been transformed from a subject of scholarly cognition to an
issue conveyed to a larger audience through visual images and emotive personalization
– a development Goldhagen introduced, much more explicitly than
Browning, to a historiography that so far had avoided confronting the issue of
what perpetration meant to the victims in concrete terms.
Wrapped in the questionable thesis of a bygone form of antisemitism,
Goldhagen’s descriptions of anti-Jewish violence and brutality confirmed the
prevailing German assumption that the Holocaust was, in all its aspects, a thing
of the past, with no line of continuity linking it to the present. Historiography
could offer little to counter this view. Even insightful, empirically grounded
studies produced in the 1990s had for the most part either excluded ideology,
racism and antisemitism as explanatory factors or had drawn an abstract picture
of the perpetrators’ mindset. Götz Aly’s stimulating synopsis of the driving
forces that led from ‘ethnic planning’ to the Holocaust presents racial ideas as
an important yet vague aspect with little if any direct relevance to the course of
events. 38 In his influential study on Werner Best, a key official in Heydrich’s
security police apparatus, Ulrich Herbert stresses the matter-of-fact, emotionally
detached attitude of this core group of genocidal planners vis-à-vis the ‘Jewish
Question’ – an interpretation that, while valid for some Third Reich intellectuals
and bureaucrats, reaches the limits of its explanatory power when applied to
the on-site executioners of the ‘Final Solution’. 39 Only in the late 1990s has
historiography begun to pay more attention to the mental, institutional and
social milieu as well as to the interests (many of them material) that facilitated
and accompanied the murder of the Jews. However, different from Goldhagen,
most historians have found it extremely difficult to link Holocaust perpetration
to a specific mindset or disposition; too scarce and unreliable are the sources
and too broad is the spectrum of perpetrators that transcends character traits,
group affiliations or national allegiances. 40
Not surprisingly given his simplistic approach, Goldhagen’s interpretation
replaced old myths – for example, the long-held though already largely discarded
notion of a ‘clean’, machine-like process of mass murder performed by a small
group – with new ones: most obviously by alleging that the continuity of German
antisemitism had been radically broken after 1945, but also by shifting responsibility
to an amorphous entity like ‘the Germans’, as if Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft
had been unperturbed by internal divisions and imbalances in power
between different strata of society and functional groups. The controversy over
an exhibition produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger
Institut für Sozialforschung, HIS) on the Wehrmacht and its crimes in the
East confirmed how much and in how many ways the German army had
contributed to the Holocaust and other policies of state-sponsored mass