The Historiography of the Holocaust

210 Jürgen Matthäus
perpetrators. As this sketchy outline illustrates, since the end of the war historiography
has been through several, chronologically not clearly delineated phases
in dealing with the agents of the ‘Final Solution’. From early images of habitual
murderers and social outcasts, the historian’s perspective has broadened over
time to encompass a range of people, functions, actions and motives that highlights
the complexity of the persecution process at large without neglecting the
crucial element of personal responsibility. The blurred, monochrome picture of
earlier decades with Himmler’s black elite as its most prominent feature has been
replaced by a multi-coloured, complex, but no less depressing mosaic in which
convinced Nazis and outright criminals seem just as important to the ‘Final
Solution’ as German society and other ‘bystanders’. Historians have begun to
realize that their profession has dealt with the Holocaust only reluctantly and
haphazardly. Other disciplines have provided much of the material and conceptual
groundwork from which historiography borrowed while public debates
sometimes spurred, sometimes delayed critical reinterpretation. If progress was
slow and anything but linear, the same can be said about how historians dealt
with the fate of Holocaust victims – a phenomenon that highlights the artificiality
of segregating perpetrator- from victim-oriented research.
Despite the potential of recent historiography, it also entails problematic
tendencies. As indicated by the emergence of the new term Täterforschung
(perpetrator research), German historians dealing with Holocaust perpetrators
focus heavily on their personality and participation in criminal actions. As much
as Holocaust historians have in the past neglected the often graphic evidence
produced by prosecutors and courts, they now seem obsessed with it – a rather
ironic development if not a sign of overcompensation in the wake of the
Goldhagen debate. Two caveats should be added. First, it can be assumed that
adults, in becoming perpetrators, do not lose their other defining characteristics
or sever their social ties unless one adopts a narrow, biologistic definition close
to the old thesis of the homicidal maniac which, for all we know, applies to very
few of the hundreds of thousands of agents of genocide. The more we restrict
our analysis to the incriminating act, the greater the risk of severing causal and
chronological connections with other, no less relevant aspects of the past.
Second, irrespective of the influences working on a person, the socialization
towards mass murder involves conscious decisions at every stage. In view of
the limits of the historian’s methods, identifying the motives behind these
decisions is not, strictly speaking, an historiographical issue. To many looking
for lessons from the past, this might be a purist and unsatisfactory interpretation
of the historian’s role; however, it seems appropriate at a time when many
facets of the ‘Final Solution’ still remain to be thoroughly researched.
Historians tend to ignore the fact that their efforts do not always transform
into accepted images of the past and, if they do, that these images might reflect
already existing assumptions more than lead to critical re-evaluation. Regarding